#1077 Dave Collum On Why Everything Is Worse Than You Think

Dave Collum is a Professor at Cornell University and is a leading thinker on markets and the larger world around us. In this conversation, we discuss why he's so bearish on the market and how he's preparing for the next 12 months. We also get into various controversial topics including China, Putin, the election and the virus. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Don't miss Mainnet, the most anticipated crypto event of the year, September 21-23 in New York City. Join 4000+ crypto builders and thought leaders for 3-days of can't-be-missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. Get $300 off of your pass today by visiting https://mainnet.events and entering promo code "POMP" at check out. See you this fall at Mainnet 2022! ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again:You can invest in crypto tax free. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Crypto wallets and browser extensions are outdated, limited in features, and don’t meet the needs of today’s Web3 users. Core, the free, non-custodial browser extension built by Ava Labs, is more than just a wallet. Core is packed with features that give Avalanche users a more seamless, and secure, Web3 experience. With Core, any crypto user can easily swap assets, display NFTs in a beautiful interface, and store your assets in a Ledger-enabled wallet. Plus you can put real dollars in your Core wallet in just a few clicks. Go to www.core.app to access the full power of Web3 on Avalanche! ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: That’s right, Unstoppable Domains and Blockchain.com partnered to create NFT domain names ending in . Blockchain. It’s the perfect ending to show that you’re a believer in a decentralized future. The Blockchain.com community can get one, for free by signing up for the waitlist here. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ==================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off.

• 0:12Anthony Pompliano?

  David Collum is a professor at Cornell University. He also is a leading thinker on markets and the larger world around us. In this conversation, we talk about everything, including why he's so bearish on the future months to come, what he thinks about various topics like Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, the election, the virus, and much more. We also spend quite a bit of time talking about financial markets and financial assets, including Fed policy and many other topics that most of you are interested in. I really enjoyed this conversation with David, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Let's get into this episode and let me know what you think once you've completed it.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, I have Dave here. I don't know, we've recorded two or three times. This one's going to be the best one because we live in the most chaotic times. Let's maybe start with the easy stuff. The Federal Reserve, they for, I don't know, months told us inflation is transitory. Newsflash, doesn't seem so transitory. They now are saying that they're going to create tighter financial conditions and that will bring down inflation. Doesn't seem to necessarily be working. What's your general read on the Federal Reserve as the market maker and ultimately the judge, the jury, and the executioner of financial assets right now?

• 1:49Speaker 03

  I don't think they have control of the inflation at all. You know, Roach warned about it in an article about two years ago that they were making the same mistake as Arthur Burns. Smart guys I know like Einhorn and stuff all say it's gotten into the DNA. The question I'd like to ask rhetorically is if you're a contractor and you were going to build a house two years from now, what sort of markup would you put on materials and labor? To bid that house and the number would not be 3%. So that's the inflation expectation problem and I think it's profound.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  The idiots who say because inflation held firm at 8.5%, which we can ignore the, you know, it's not 8.5% story. It's much higher, but Jimmy Iorio yesterday said his restaurant's doing 23, 24%. In any event,

• 2:48Speaker 03

  the headline was that it didn't go up anymore. And then Kamala, the rocket surgeon, said therefore there was no inflation. So it's sitting at 8.5% by official numbers. She said therefore there's no inflation. I go Kamala, you should have taken calculus. That's a second derivative thing you're talking about there.

• 3:09Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see this, so I think using the construction example is a perfect way to look at markets, to look at how the real economy works. And I don't know what the answer is in terms of a contractor that is looking to bid a house that'll be built, you know, forget two years, just one year from now.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And I agree, it's not 3%. And I actually think they don't know. And so some of that is just them causing slowdowns, them trying to wait. When we saw the explosion in lumber prices, there was a ton of people saying like, we have no clue where this price will be 30 days from now, let alone, you know, six months or 12 months from now. And so I guess less about the specifics of the numbers, but just when you have so much volatility in various parts of the economy and so much uncertainty, what are the second and third order effects of that? Should we expect there to be breaking of additional things across the economy just because people are scared or people are uncertain of the future? Or has markets always operated this way and maybe it's just being magnified because

• 4:13Anthony Pompliano?

  we're seeing big inflation numbers?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Well, to the extent that we've all seen over and over and over numbers quoted saying that the average person doesn't have $400 to replace a microwave if it breaks. And now the cheap ones cost 400, so that's a good number. To the extent that They say that the median family doesn't have that, then if all of a sudden you tack on, let's say conservatively, eight and a half, nine, 10% increased costs annualized, where is that money going to come from? And, and so I think you can hear, you know, glass shattering, you know, teeth flying around the room now because I think the average family can't pay the bills.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And as we see this, obviously, core inflation tends to be a metric that economists and politicians love to point to. I see you shaking your head. Core inflation having all the things that you actually consume not included, which is, you know, some big brain mathematical analysis. What, what should we actually be paying attention to? Is the CPI number the thing to watch? Is it something like real wage growth? Like, how do you actually analyze via the data that we are provided, what's going on?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Well, ironically, I mean, remember when inflation was low and everyone was ranting about how it would be great if they had inflation? I thought it's would somehow deal with their, their mortgages and stuff. And I'm going, you guys have no understanding of inflation. No one who's lived through a serious inflation, which I'm old enough to remember in high school and in college, no, no one who's lived through it knows that it's good news. Anyone who's lived through it knows it's good, it's bad news. These guys who say something else is going to erode their debt or something are dreaming because their, their wages are not going to keep up. And when the wages catch up, then you have all these secondary effects

• 6:13Speaker 03

  like, well, first and foremost, the markets are going to cut their profit margins in half easily because of the labor costs. And, and, and so they're going to have to either jack up prices, which is going to make it even worse, or they're not going to be able to jack up prices, which means that the market's just double valuation. So there's things like that. There are just so many. What do you, what do you do if you've signed a contract for five years? For I have a dog in my lap, so it's going to be a little jiggly here. What do you do if you've signed a contract for five years, all of a sudden your cost of goods and services are the projections are just way the hell wrong. This gets back to the house. But but there are long term contracts, you know, there's people who have, you know,

• 6:58Speaker 03

  five year wage contracts because they signed them. Their union reps signed them back in 2019. I don't know. It's just it's just nothing good comes of inflation.

• 7:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  And the people who think it does are just have just not seen inflation before.

• 7:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And when we look at something like the labor market, obviously, the Federal Reserve and many other organizations continue to point to a strong labor market, and they're specifically looking at the unemployment rate sitting, you know, 3.5, 3.6%. Open roles in America, 10, 11 million, depending on the week. Is it something where the labor market will be a lagging indicator of a recession or trouble, and we should expect those numbers to degrade in the coming months? Or can we actually get this like stagflationary period and the labor market stays strong, but people are being hurt on the real wage front?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Well, you put in a premise there. I don't think it's a strong labor market. I think it's a broken labor market. So if you look at labor force participation, it's pathetic. It's it's bad. And so the fact that somehow labor and management are not meeting eye to eye to come up with with a working arrangement means that price discovery in the labor market is broken. I I just it I would never call this a strong labor market. I'd call it tight, but it's tight because it's not working, right? The food market is tight when there's no bread on the shelves, right? Same thing.

• 8:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Explain a little bit more what you mean by it's tight, but it's not working.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Well, again, back to labor force participation. We've got a ton of people who are not working, and I can't even tell you why. It's a surreal thing. It's like if you walked out in the woods and there was no, no birds and no squirrels, and you go, there's something wrong here, right? There's something creepy quiet. And and whenever I ask, and every establishment I go into, everyone, they look understaffed to me, and they act understaffed, right? So you're getting lousy service, you're a Walmart, you can't find anyone to ask a question to, right? That sort of thing. You go to a restaurant, they're short of labor, they've got signs in the door, help wanted. And I asked them, where are your workers? Where did they go if they're not working here?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  And they always say, oh, somewhere else, but I haven't found this mystical mystical employer. And they just, and I don't know how they're putting food on the table. So I'm just completely and utterly baffled. If someone knows, send me an email, [email protected]. You know anything about anything that I don't know about? Send me an email. And my email box is a shitstorm, but you know, can't get much worse.

• 9:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you look at the labor market, every restaurant that I go to, I ask two questions. You know, how much have prices increased here? It's never 8.5%. It always tends to be teens or higher. And then also I see the help wanted signs on top of it. And I always ask, well, how much have you tried to raise the pay in order to elicit applications? And so there's a restaurant here in Miami that I recently was talking to, and he's like, I need dishwashers. And he said, I used to be able to pay, you know, $10, then it was 12, then it was 14. He's like, now we're offering 18, can't get anyone. And he has no clue. He's just as perplexed as you are in terms of where, where did everyone go?

• 10:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is it that we've increased over the last, you know, three years or so from $10 to $18? And we still can't get anyone to fill the role. And so I thought that was really weird. $18 for a dishwasher feels like a high price, given maybe where we're all anchored. But then I went and I started to look at other average wages and Amazon, for example. The average Amazon worker gets paid over $17 an hour. They're paying some people, you know, 20, 22, $24. And so it feels like wages, although they are going up in aggregate dollar amount, they're not keeping up with inflation. But it's a very different story than maybe what the mainstream talking points are of like, you know, Amazon screws over their workers. Like politicians are trying to implement $15 an hour. Amazon's paying 17.

• 11:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It just feels to your point like I'm confused and I don't know why I'm confused, but I don't understand what's happening.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Well, the one theory I heard from an uber smart and uber famous guy, and I never know what I should name a name or not. But you'd know him if I said his name.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  He had him over for dinner and he pointed out two important things. One is he said that unrelated, but still worth putting in your quiver, that $18 trillion with the US debt is going to roll over in the next two years. 18 trillion, 18 trillion. And then he said that he thought that maybe it was during the lockdown, the illegal aliens had to go home because there was nothing here, and then they haven't made it back.

• 11:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  That's, it strikes me as a funny trickle up economics, right? These guys were kind of off radar, but if all of a sudden there's a couple million people missing, then you're playing some screwy game of Connect Four or something, where it's, the patterns are changing. I don't know.

• 12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the themes, I don't know, maybe through the end of last year was the great resignation. All these people were quitting their jobs, even into the beginning of this year. And what I don't know how to measure, but it feels like a lot of these folks went and they created jobs for themselves, but they're not actually creating what we would traditionally think of as a business, and they're also not going and filling other open roles. So, an easy example would be if somebody leaves their job and they start a Substack newsletter, which seems really small.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  There's a real wealth creator, huh?

• 12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Well, if you think about it, right now, all of a sudden, it's like, hey, I have all this freedom, and we, you know, we'll get into kind of the pros and cons of the freedom of movement and the freedom not to go into the office versus like how much money you make and kind of your ability to invest capital and reach financial security. But it just feels like there's a lot of things like that, but it doesn't feel like there's millions of people who did that. So, it's still, even if you account for these, you know, kind of non-traditional jobs, or these non-traditional, essentially company creations, there's still a ton of people missing from the labor force that no one seems to be able to find.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Well, the worst I heard is I had a couple of guys deliver a washing machine, and I asked them that question, and one of them said he actually is, he's a truck driver, and he just muscles the washing machine, big burly guy. He is up from Georgia and they put him in a hotel at night. He drives a truck around New England and I asked him, where is everyone? And he said, they're trading Bitcoin.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  I go, well, that's really gotten profitable over the last few months. So in any case, I don't have an answer. It really is a mystery to me and it's, but it, but it tells me something's broken, right? There's something so eerie and creepy in the world and it's just one more log on the bonfire of why the hell is the world what it is. I've just never felt, it feels like I'm in some sci-fi movie or something.

• 14:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When we switch from labor force, maybe we look at things like shelter, the CPI calculation, 33% of it is shelter. They still are estimating that it is non-existent, 5% increase or something year over year. But real estate prices are up, you know, near 20%. Rents are up near 20%. So the first question, you know, that I always ask is like, how do they calculate shelter if rent and real estate are both up 20%, but they say it's up 5? But is this just a continuation? Like as things get confusing, as things break across the market, we'll continue to see bad data and we'll also continue to see parts of the market that used to be very important and very well understood, we should expect

• 15:11Anthony Pompliano?

  to just have less and less understanding moving forward?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Well, this gets to the question of the, the, the, uh, the, uh, housing and rental markets being either, uh, broken or, or having changed profoundly in the last decade. And so we go through that great. Building boom from around, it started around 1998, actually. The first writings of a subprime crisis were in 98. I wrote about it in 2002. I thought the banking system would collapse soon. It took five more years. But then what happened is we get the collapse. And then the question is, okay, so you have this massive inventory of houses. Where did they all go? And who bought them?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  And why, why, how did that inventory get absorbed? And this gets to a theory of some off, off Broadway thinkers who say that it was actually sort of a hostile takeover of the housing market by permanent capital. So they say the housing bubble is bigger now, but you don't see the froth in the housing bubble. I mean, the fact is, you know, they're all cash deals and there's people bidding like crazy, but you don't have the condo flippers. You don't have the crazy, you don't have the people, you don't have the euphoria. So it doesn't feel the same. What I think happened, and the number that I'm about to quote a number that was from

• 16:43Speaker 03

  a credible source, but it's an incredible number. And that is that I think permanent capital bought up all those houses. So big, huge tranches of money coming out of BlackRock and places like that. And I think they scooped it all up. Now, a single occupant, single family dwellings are a terrible, terrible business. And the only way you make it a good business, you know, you're supposed to make something like one seventh of the cost of the house per year for it to be profitable, right? That's a historical number. And no one's getting that. So the question is, how's it working? Well, it turns out you get there by getting cheap capital and heavy leverage.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  And what I heard was, is that BlackRock, who clearly was scooping up vast, vast swaths of single family housing and buying up companies who are scooping it up and stuff like that. So you had these aggregators, it's sort of like in Russia where you had aggregators of the Russian chits after the Berlin Wall fell. And then people would buy the chits off the aggregators. So BlackRock, I heard, was getting money at 0.15%.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  So if you can, if you can make 0.15% on a rental net, um, above 0.15%, so if you can make 0.3%, then you've got a profitable business. Now, that's just absurdity, right? That's just, that's just a broken market again. And so at some point, I'm a big believer that regression to the mean is a force of nature. I, I got in an argument with someone, say, oh, the markets can just keep going up. I said, no, no, they can't. They, they, they won't. They, that, you know, the credit cycle will end. Everything will end. Everything comes to an end. And, and it starts all over again. And someone shakes the damn, I just got you. We all end up paying for it. Um, and, and we, we will have a bust. And, and I think what's going to happen is,

• 18:44Speaker 03

  again, I've mentioned several podcasts, so I feel like I'm recycling here, but, um, different, the, the overlap of podcasts is so small. Um, I, I, I, I have two black swans in my skull. And obviously they're not my black swans because they're in my skull. So they can't be a black swan. But I think for the average investor, there'll be a black swan. And one is that the Fed grew a spine. And, and is not going to stop. Now, the equity investors really ought to be troubled in general, because it seems clear to me that the Fed is going to keep hiking until it something breaks.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Now, people forget what something breaks mean. They're defaults, they're, they're, they're, they're collapses, they're, they're World Cobs, they're Enrons, they're, they're, they're bad things. And, and those were during a, a generic collapse. Then you get to the big collapse like 08, 09. I think this one will be bigger. I, I, I think the next one will be bigger than 08, 09. And part of it's because the inflation's going to box them in. So, so the Fed's going to keep hiking until it breaks. And breaking doesn't mean a 20% drop of the Dow. Breaking means broken bones, right? ICUs, this is, this is what they'll do. And so as long as the markets keep going up,

• 20:03Speaker 03

  as long as the collapses are not showing up yet, um, then, then I don't see a mechanism by which the Fed will stop. And, and Again, I finally got an answer to a question I didn't have for a long, long time is, you know, guys like James Grant say 20% of the S and P are zombies. 20% of the S and P can't pay their, their, their interest payments with their cash flow. These are the 500 biggest companies in the United States, and they can't pay their interest payments with their cash flow. Now, to calibrate you, if you go back to the late 90s, I think it was the late 90s, but somewhere in the 90s, the zombie count was, was 2% and the interest rates were 9%.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  So this shows you how out of whack we are. So when those guys break, and, and 100 of the S and P 500 can't pay their interest payments, and the Fed is boxed in by horrible inflation, what's gonna happen? I, I just don't know, but I think, I think there'll be a lot of people being brought in on their shields, carried off the battlefield.

• 21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you look at this, you mentioned that the Fed has grown a spine. Obviously, they've talked-

• 21:15Speaker 03

  I'm not sure they have. That's, that's black, that's black swan number one.

• 21:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  I don't know if they have, but now, black swan number two is that they, they pivot, as they like to say, and, and it doesn't work. And all of a sudden, the metrics just keep doing what they're doing, and, and things go bad, and you find out that the Fed is finally out of ammo. And the way I like to describe this, you know, the 40-year credit cycle is a, is a, that's, that's a typical length of a credit cycle, supposedly. I, I, you know, I'd have to ask Lacy Hunt to fill in those details, but, um, but, but credit cycles are very long and sluggish things, and if it's over, then the game's over, right? The, the whole equity game is over. Um, we're gonna go through a tough period. And, um, and

• 22:03Speaker 03

  so, uh, again, 18 trillion rolling over. Who's gonna buy all that debt? What, I just don't, I, I have trouble picking. This is stage four cancer. And, and, and you say, well, what do you do? And the answer is you put your fair share in it.

• 22:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you look at it, if the Fed, let's go through both these scenarios. If the Fed did grow a spine and they continue to hike rates, how high do you think the rates can get before things would break, right? There's a lot of folks who say, hey, they can't get to 5% or 6% interest rates because, you know, the US will default and the system will break and kind of all these problems. How do you just think through maybe how high could it actually go?

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Well, it could be they're already there and it's just time now, right? It could be that the, that, remember in, um, in 08, 09, I, I literally told my class in March of 2007 that I thought the banking system was about to collapse. And this was not me analyzing spreadsheets, this is just reading smart guys. And, uh, and, and, and, but most people couldn't see the cracks. The housing market cracked in 06, and so the housing market had already peaked. And so that game was over. And so that was a systemic problem. And, uh, but it took, it takes markets and takes, if you put a 20-pound block of ice

• 23:27Speaker 03

  out on the street in 95-degree weather, it wouldn't just turn to water. It takes time. There's kinetics to the process. So it could already be there. Um, but the Fed will keep hiking because the Fed will keep hiking into, until the breaking occurs. And that's why they overshoot because there's a lag, right? It's like driving a, driving a car with loose steering, right? You go to turn and it doesn't respond right away. So you turn harder, next thing you know, you're fishtailing.

• 23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, uh, it reminds me a lot of last year, they were still conducting QE and still suppressing interest rates and we had 7% inflation. Like, talk about overshooting, uh, just absolute, in hindsight, insanity. And it feels like, uh, they are likely to repeat that now on the other end of the spectrum, uh, because they're going to wait till it breaks and then it takes time for them to pivot. It takes time for the market to internalize that pivot and kind of work its way through. So is this just now a game where the Fed will continue to overshoot in each direction as we kind of go through boom and bust cycles and there's just nothing they can do about it? Or do we need somebody to step in there and say, hey, let's stop the madness and prevent

• 24:39Anthony Pompliano?

  ourselves from overshooting, uh, and try to look forward rather than look backwards in data?

• 24:44Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  The thing we should, and this is not in isolation either, right? So before we're done, we will have talked about all the fucked up things that might completely remove the control from the Fed, right? Wars and famines and, you know, just there's so many ways the Fed, you can't, the Fed can't print wheat, the Fed can't print natural gas, the Fed can't print oil. Um, so, so, um, and so I, I, I, I, I'm at a loss to see how this plays out. This is again, the stage four cancer model. I, I, I feel like it's, it's game over, but I'm sitting going, I'm having trouble picturing

• 25:31Speaker 03

  this whole death thing, you know, it's kind of not working yet for me, right?

• 25:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what do you mean it's game over? Is it game over in terms of like a US default? It's a, just so much stuff breaks in the system that it, you know, goes back to the, the analogy of like shaking the Etch A Sketch and we start over? What, what does that mean?

• 25:46Speaker 03

  I, when I say game over, I mean, I think we're going to get a generational wake up call. So the, the 40 year credit cycle, so yeah, there's a guy named Murray Stahl at Horizon Kinetics who I've, I've been following for years, but, but I listen, I got invited to listen to one of their internal conference calls due to a friend at RBC and, uh, Murray's a genius and, and he said in, uh, nine, early 1980s, two miraculous things happened. One is Russia was collapsing. They weren't done yet, but they were starting to, and they desperately needed capital and all they had were resources. So they just flooded the world with resources.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  China was coming out of its medieval period and, and they desperately needed capital. All they had was labor. So they sold labor dirt cheap. And so we've had 40 years of unlimited resources, unlimited labor and, and, and he says that's not to be repeated. I would add on top of that a 40 year credit cycle, superimposed right on top of it, although it's possible the 40 year credit cycle somehow because of that, right? Maybe, maybe, maybe Volcker didn't slide inflation at all. May, maybe, maybe those two miraculous things are what stopped inflation. Um, and, and there's just things like that, that, that, that just keep occurring. We started with a

• 27:10Speaker 03

  We started with interest rates at 16, they went below two 30 year rates. How and and you know, if you if you use the Fed model, which I agree with at one level, I think the idea that somehow rates correlate with equity prices. Where I disagree violently with the Fed model is that you use interest rates to justify the equity prices because in that case you're not explaining it, you're justifying it. And and you can say all you can say, well, yeah, equity prices are fair value because interest rates are so low. And I go, so you're gonna you're gonna justify interest rates equity prices by comparing it to the biggest bubble in history? The biggest, the most gargantuan bubble in history?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Have a ball with that, but you know, just because someone bought a Toyota for 150,000 doesn't mean I'm gonna buy a Honda for 170, right? It just doesn't work that way. You're still screwed either way.

• 28:04Anthony Pompliano?

  If we go to the other black swan of the Fed potentially pivoting, midterm elections, I think, is one reason why people are saying, oh, they'll never go into the midterm elections with high inflation or recession, you know, shocker, maybe we'll get both as we go.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  I don't buy that at all. I don't buy that at all.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  I think the midterm elections are already written down. I think I think, you know, the Democrats are desperately trying to achieve something, but it's probably not the midterm elections. So I think what you do is you let I think I think this is where you euthanize the patient. You let the Republicans grab control of Congress and the Senate and you just let it go. It's it's too late, right? You're in a barrel, you're going down the Niagara River, you know, help do something. Sorry, it's too late, you're done.

• 28:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  So the midterms are a write off. Unless they're not, at which point, um, did you see that that election and that recall vote in California where where they're recalling one of, they say one of Soros's appointments, I always feel creepy saying that. And, and they discounted, they threw out 30% of the votes, they threw the, the poll watchers out, they did the same thing over again. So, so if, if, if the midterm election somehow, if there's a, you know, miracle on ice moment, and the Democrats managed to hold power, I will never believe in another election.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  I, I already not sure I will ever believe in another election. I think they've been playing capture the flag for years, actually, but, but the, the anti-Trump one of 2020, I'm a big believer they rigged it. I, I, I, I would comfortably bet, yeah, to me, it's a lot, it'd be a lot safer bet than an S and P index fund to me.

• 29:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that more in terms of like, why are you so confident?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, I think the data's there. Some more stuff came out with the, you know, 2000 mules, but I, I, I watched it, I read about it. There's just so many things that just didn't make sense to me. And then on top of that, the, the, the, the drop dead argument is that they've done everything imaginable to take Trump out at the kneecaps, right? Everything imaginable. They've corrupted the FBI, they've done everything, but they forgot to rig the election? I don't think so. I, I find that not even imaginable. They rigged him.

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  I, I don't doubt it. And, and people say, well, there was 61 court cases, they didn't win any of them. They never made it to evidentiary standards. None of them. That's the rig. The rig is that not a single case went to court. They ended up in the courtroom, but didn't go to trial. They, they never got adjudicated.

• 30:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Code Pomp and you'll get $300 off. I'll see you this fall at Main Net 2022. This episode is brought to you by LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of liquidity and they have 100% uptime track record through all the volatility spikes. LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology means that LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services. LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Go learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Again, that's LMAXdigital.com/pomp. So, one of the things that I've asked folks on both sides of this, right? Some people believe, "Hey, I can't trust it." Some people say, "You know, those are the results."

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Is, I always ask-

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Well, it's both. That's both.

• 32:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. And what I say to them is I say, "Listen, um, do you think that 100% of people who have voted in every single election, there's been no errors?" And people always say-

• 32:18Speaker 03

  No, but it's worse than that, though. I mean, there's gonna be screw-ups, no matter what. Dead guys have been voting since they started voting, right?

• 32:27Speaker 03

  But, but I think it was wholesale. I think it was, I think it was so in-advance rigged, where, um, where they, they made sure that they didn't go to bed that night wondering who would win. That they made sure that, that, that they would have the votes by morning. And, uh, and, and, and the mail-in ballots and the whole thing was set up perfectly for the rig.

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so this is the big difference, in my opinion, right? Is to your point about like dead people have been voting in elections forever, right? It's usually been-

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's just noise.

• 32:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's usually been such a small percentage that it doesn't sway the outcome. And, uh, I think most people, they don't like to think about it that way. It's true in every country. You're trying to get millions and millions of people to all cast some, you know, votes on something. And so that happens, whatever. What you're talking about, though, seems to be something that is much more malicious, nefarious, planned-

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Total deep state, total deep state.

• 33:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so-

• 33:23Speaker 03

  So, here, here's, let me, let me dial it back, though. WikiLeaks had emails about election rigging. There were emails that suggested, I can't remember which of the two candidates won Pennsylvania because of rigging. It came out of a WikiLeaks or something like that. But years ago, when I think when Bush Junior was running, um, YouTube was filled with with computer scientists showing how you could rig a machine in a heartbeat, right? So that again, but that's kind of the the capture the flag baloney stuff. That's just kind of the the gaming that they do. And since both candidates were pre-vetted, it didn't really matter. They didn't care who won, and it was probably relatively balanced battle. Um, but but but I think it was during the Bush election.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  The CEO of Diebold, which controlled the voting machines at the time, um, was a Bush fundraiser, a big one. And and there's just no mechanism that that that's legit, right? That that just shouldn't exist. If you're controlling the voting machines, you should shut your mouth and stay out of it. And, uh, and then, of course, the voting machines rolled over to, um, to Dominion. Now here's the the horror story of Dominion. Dominion's a Canadian company. And you go, OK, so a for a foreign sovereign state controls our voting machines. That makes me nervous, although I'm not sure I trust them any less than than we controlling our voting machines.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  But it turns out Dominion, um, the Dominion, um, uh, CEO had done big favors for for for the Biden. He was involved in the Biden transition. And and then you say, OK, that's a problem. But then you find out Dominion's actually a subsidiary of a subsidiary of UBS. And you go, OK, that's a problem. Therefore, it's not only owned by a sovereign state, but it's not even Canada. And then you find out that that subsidiary is largely owned by a company in Beijing. So our voting machines are owned by Beijing. And that then the plot thickens when you remember that the voting machines, the voting

• 35:29Speaker 03

  system was was was connected to the Internet that night. And a lot of people don't know what that means. What it means that from across the world, they could, they could change all the votes.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this something that moving forward will always now be part of the conversation? Like, the United States, historically, was the legitimacy of elections, the legitimacy of various organizations, it was taboo. It, it, it wasn't even a conversation without somebody saying, you know, "Go put your tinfoil hat on and sit in the corner." Now, I see it on every mainstream side. I see the Democratic, you know, mainstream conversation. I see the Republican mainstream conversation. It feels like the conversation across the board is very, very different in 2022 than it was in 2019, before a lot of this stuff happened.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Well, so, you know, I'm, I, I certainly lean right, but that's not to say that I like Republicans. And, and so I voted for Bush Jr., who I didn't like, the first time and not the second time, because he, he fucked up completely, right? He, he, he got us into a war. He killed upwards of a million people, and it was all baloney. And so that, to me, I, I, for years, I've been putting it in the war crime category. The weapons of mass destruction was a complete ruse, you know? You can't let a guy get away with that. I mean, he should be taken to The Hague for that one. But, um, I, I, I think people

• 36:59Speaker 03

  are reaching a point where they feel like they don't have anyone on their side. And I think that's where the populism is popping. Populism is both left and right. Revolutions, which I think we're in, I think we're in a nasty one, actually, but it's, it's, it's, it's under the surface, but it's real. They can come from the left or the right, and I think this one is coming from the left. So this is, you know, the whole critical race theory, the whole, the whole getting rid of religion, the whole, um, they're just, almost every topic, the January 6 hearings, the, the, the rigging the election. So, so to me, the left seem like the guilty party largely now. And the right look like they're being

• 37:44Speaker 03

  responsive. They're, they're just getting irritated. I think January 6, the moment was optically ugly. I think January 6, the response to that moment is, is horrific.

• 37:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Well, there's several there that I mean, one is the role of the FBI on January 6th is undeniable. We don't have good numbers, but you know, someone explain Larry Epps, right? But there were many, many more. There's an estimated 80 co-conspirators who didn't get indicted, who certainly look like feds. When, when the smashing of the windows and the smashing of the doors and the damage in the rallying is done by feds, what kind of a country have we become? And so then, great example, QAnon Shaman Boy, right? He's nuts, right? They say he's unstable. I go, what, what gave you that idea, right?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  He's wearing a Viking helmet. He broke nothing. He walked through an open door that had been opened from the inside. He, he, he hurt nobody. And he got, I think it was four or seven years in prison. How do you get that? I don't understand. I can't, I'm not even sure what crime he committed. I'm sure there's some trespassing crime. But that's, that's, and that's the Democrats. So you guys can rot in hell. You Democratic operatives who did that to that guy and who put, you know, what, 700 people in prison, in solitary, without trial for the longest time and, and threatened, you know, 20, 30 year jail sentences and

• 39:23Speaker 03

  stuff like that. I hope you eat shit and die. I, I, I would, I, I, it's, you go any further than that, I, I think it's lock and load time by the red states.

• 39:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this something where both sides of the aisle are just ratcheting up the response to each other? And what I mean by that is, you, you see, you know, I don't, I don't know, you see the language used, you see the constant like one-upping of each other. And maybe some of this is just like social media polls to the extremes. But then also you're starting to see action as well. And you can see something like, I don't know, Ron DeSantis going after Disney. And then you see something like Gavin Newsom doing things in California that is causing people to leave the state. And you just kind of see these different things. And I think to the people who like to believe that they're

• 40:20Anthony Pompliano?

  rational or somewhat centrist, they say to themselves like, the world is going crazy? And like, I'm confused as to how we got here?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  I see, that's why I said the Republicans are being responsive. I see the Democrats as the ones who are taking it to the next level every time. Right now, that's why I clarify between, you know, left and right-based revolutions. But to me, the Republicans look like they're playing defense. I don't, I don't. So, so the whole thing at some level started from the Republicans many years ago. I think Gingrich turned politics ugly. I think, I think he decided it was time to take off the gloves and start bashing people. So I think the Republicans get credit for, for starting the brawl.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  I think as much as Clinton's a sleaze-ball sociopath, I should clarify, Bill Clinton's a sleaze-ball sociopath. Not that they're, not both, but it was an ambiguous sentence.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  That's not good. We have a president who's accused of being a rapist. I think, we have a president who's accused of having a body count, right? This is, this is a problem. But, but, but, even with that said, you know, the Republicans going after him on a perjury charge and stuff like that. These are procedural things and I, so in many ways, Republicans started it. But now the Democrats have picked up their A-game. The censorship is coming out of the left, right? The censorship is all left-wing. I, I don't see Republicans censoring the left at all. So again, send me an email. If, if, if, if trying to stop teaching gender theory to five-year-olds is censorship, then I guess you can stretch the definition.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  But, but if I was a parent with a five-year-old and the kid came home and told me what they're teaching that kid in school, I'd, I'd... Did you see the guy who got hauled out of a town, a, a school board meeting because his daughter had been raped in a bathroom by a transgender?

• 42:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I did not.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he's at a school board meeting. His daughter had been raped by a transgender and the school board tried to hide it.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Now, they've obviously eventually got the guy. And it's a guy. Right? If you're raping girls, you're a dude. Right? You can pretend all you want about the others, but the rapist. There's something wrong there. And anyway, he goes to the school board, he's mad as a hornet. And, and they haul him out there. The cops haul him out. And I'm going, I, I'm amazed that he took that avenue to get to the school board. I, I'm still, I'm, I'm actually baffled. We're not seeing frontier justice, vigilante justice. I, I, my daughter gets raped, someone's gonna die.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. There, there is, um, I, I forget the name of the, the person now. Maybe we can, uh, we, we can pull it up, uh, in a second or, or look it up. Uh, but I think there's a UFC fighter who, someone in his family, uh, was sexually assaulted, uh, and maybe even raped. I, I can't remember exact details, uh, but he went after him.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And ended up getting arrested. Um.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  And if you're on the jury, if you're on the jury, you're gonna convict that guy?

• 43:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I tend to think that, uh, uh, if you're the prosecutor, you don't want to go to a jury.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Well, but if the prosecutor's a left winger.

• 43:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  You don't know. This is the problem. And, uh, if, if you're, or should I say dishonorable? How's that? To be more fair. Then there's the guy, lone survivor, right? Remember that, that, that Navy CO, the only survivor of a, of a, of a, a raid in Afghanistan or something?

• 44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  And, um, and, and some guy shot his dog.

• 44:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  So he hopped in his truck and he's chasing him down and he called the cops. He said, you gotta help me here, cause if I catch him, I'm killing him. And the cops intervened and got him. And the guy got something like three years in jail, which is exactly what the hell should happen.

• 44:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Right? That, that's, I know that, and enough, but, but these guys didn't know what they were doing. They were just punk ass kids, but, but, but, but that is. There are, there are crimes to me that are, that on paper are not as bad as they are in reality. So if you shoot your spouse, who knows what the story is. But there, there are things that happen where you go, oh, that, that really, they don't even have to be capital offenses, I go, but that's, that's deeply bad. So.

• 44:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the, um, the pieces, uh, that seems to be missing from the mainstream, uh, conversation around, you know, guns, uh, crime, all this. Uh, remember in the Indiana mall, there was a, I think he was like a 22 year old kid. He, I think the way the story was told was he was sitting in the food court, uh, with his girlfriend and a guy walked out of the bathroom, started shooting people and it was in like.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  He plugged him.

• 45:23Anthony Pompliano?

  18 seconds, right? In 18 seconds, he pulled out a gun and he took him down and.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  He, he was a nationally ranked marksman based on, based on his performance. From 40 yards, he hit him seven out of eight shots with a handgun.

• 45:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and, and you look at that, and again, like, I, I'm always careful in that. I don't think anyone, uh, wants to live in a society where, uh, we basically return back to like the okay corral. We just, you know, hey, let's meet at high noon and everyone pull out guns and start firing at each other. Uh, but it does bring a point of, um, there's the gun control debate. There's also, uh, the armed citizens being able to protect themselves. And then I think you start thinking of these like sanctuary cities or, or these kind of, uh, decriminalization from the prosecutors versus, uh, actually having the laws changed. And it gets in this weird world where you start to say like, this is a very complex

• 46:18Anthony Pompliano?

  issue, but I think if we focus on the majority of citizens want to live in a safe society where they can go about their business and they are not worried about getting robbed, getting their things stolen, uh, or having to deal with violence on a day-to-day basis. A lot of the complexities starts to look a little bit more clear as long as we agree like that is the goal. But when you hear some of these people talk, I don't know if that is the goal. Like it, it, there seems to be other goals that are competing with just like, let's create a safe society for the average citizen.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Well, so the overarching theory that covers all these concerns of ours is that someone's trying to destroy us.

• 47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you believe that?

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Well, certainly, well, let me ask you this, are we trying to destroy Putin?

• 47:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Depends who you ask.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Right, if you ask me, the answer is yes. And so, there's no reason to believe that there's not quid pro quos around the world. There's no reason to believe that China isn't necessarily trying to rot their system. You know, the United States has become a pretty serious bully. Now, I know that there was an upside to it. I'm reading a book right now by Peter Zeihan, I think that's how I pronounce his name. And he's an extraterritorial guy, which is the intelligence analog of Blackwater. And he talks about this sort of thing.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  And it's, I lost my train of thought, but in any event, yeah, I think there are groups that are trying to undermine the United States, so we quit. Oh, the point being is, is that the arrangement we had post-war is the United States would keep the peace and that would promote global trade. Right? The United States, at times, is not keeping the peace. I mean, I get it, when I got into it over Ukraine, we'd go to Ukraine, the Ukraine story is a total mess. I don't think, I don't think any part of that story is true. I think the entire, the mainstream media's presentation of the Ukraine story is just, I think it's just fictional.

• 48:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think, what parts of what they're telling us do you think are inaccurate or erroneous?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  The parts where their lips were moving.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  The um, as soon as Ukraine showed up and right away you picked up the propaganda, right? It was like, it was like biscuits slathered with, you know, sausage gravy. And um, and so what, what I did is, uh, I'd always been somewhat intrigued by Putin.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  And I went back and I binge watched everything Putin. I uh, I uh, I went back and read articles about Ukraine that, that were pre 2022, which, which, which one could argue are going to be more accurate because they're not trying to justify a war in Ukraine. And what you discover is the, the, the, the constant conflict between NATO and Russia.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  And here's what I'll tell you from binging Putin. Putin, uh, Putin's a tough guy. There's no chance that a guy who's not a tough guy can run Russia. So if you somehow think, you know, uh, uh, you know, Justin Trudeau's going to run Russia, you're dreaming. Um, he, when he answers questions, he is unbelievably direct. And, and you listen to him, you go, that sounds truthful. It, it just, it, it, there was just no sugar coating. And, and so he, he, he gets asked about, you know, dealing with oligarchs. And he doesn't say, I whack them because, right? So he doesn't fess up to everything or I locked him up because.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  What his response to dealing with the oligarchs is they robbed Russia blind and they did. They absolutely robbed Russia blind, but, but so, so when you listen to Putin, you go, God damn it, this guy is to the point every, he doesn't duck questions. His, his answers don't seem evasive. Every once in a while you, you sense one that he doesn't want to put an answer to, but for the most part they're good. Then you start reading about, about NATO. And when the, the wall collapsed, you know, NATO made all sorts of promises to Russia that they wouldn't, you know, try to scoop up all these, all these states um, surrounding Russia.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  And they had told Russia that. Why? Because well NATO's sole purpose is to oppose Russia. So if you want to say, well Putin, you know, this bullshit about the existential risk, I go, when you've got this entire organization of countries whose sole purpose is to oppose your country, that in itself is existential risk. Now, they don't have to be acting in a risky way, but it is existential risk. Now, every time Russia gets attacked, it's been attacked by armies moving through Ukraine. Ukraine is to Russia as Mexico is to us. If

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Russia was putting troops on the border of Mexico, how many seconds would it take for us to bomb to live and piss out of them? The answer is, I don't think you'd even see the flash. I think it would just be over. And so, but where the real problem came is that Putin repeatedly, repeatedly said to NATO, "You can't have Ukraine." And you can say, "Well, he doesn't have the right to say that." And I go, "Well, we said you can't have Cuba. And we've said all sorts of things you can't do." When I really get desperate arguing with a Ukrainian weeper, and I feel terrible for the Ukrainians. They're

• 52:16Speaker 03

  going to get slaughtered. There's no question the victims here are the Ukrainians. This is an awful situation. But I don't get lost in that part of the story. The story is that it's NATO versus Russia. And when I really get frustrated, I say, "Okay, in the last 20 years, which country has bombed more other countries and killed more people? Russia or the United States?" And they all, you know, they make up some argument about, you know, why we did what we did. And I said, "Okay, Obama bombed seven Muslim countries. Which of those countries attacked us? He bombed seven of them. Which of those attacked

• 52:55Speaker 03

  us?" The answer is, "None. None." So why is that not a war crime? When we elect a liberal Democrat, aren't we supposed to stay out of wars? One of the basal things you might hope to get out of a liberal Democrat is not be in wars. Well, we apparently didn't do that very well. So we've killed millions. So statistically speaking, the United States is a bad guy. Statistically speaking. You can't make a case against it. So then Putin approaches NATO repeatedly and says, "Look, it's existential risk for us." So sovereign states have issues that aren't necessarily backed by legal, uh, rural legal tribunals, but they have issues they gotta deal with it. So when we're talking to Russia,

• 53:40Speaker 03

  and Russia's talking to the United States, which is NATO, there's no difference. It's just the United States. Um, it's one thing for the two to say, to be negotiating, saying, "Well, we can't give that up," or "You can't have this or that or that." You're negotiating. We didn't do that. We said, "We don't care." We dissed them completely. We, we completely dissed them repeatedly. And, and so when you're a sovereign state and you're facing what you believe to be existential risk, it doesn't even matter if you're right. If they say to you, "We don't care about your feelings," you know, in a, in a marriage, that's a divorce. And in, in a battle like, uh, we're facing in Ukraine now, that becomes a war. Now, on

• 54:24Speaker 03

  top of that, you had, you know, a hundred thousand Azov Battalion guys amassing in Mariupol, and the Azov Battalion's a bunch of Nazis. And the, the press will say they're not. You go pre-2022 and you find out, yes, they're Nazis. You, you watch John Mearsheimer talks, and he tells you all about the Nazis. And Mearsheimer's brilliant, actually. Steve Walt, brilliant. There are smart guys out there saying, "This is 100% NATO's fault. This war did not have to occur if NATO had been able to behave itself."

• 54:53Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of, how, how much of like the NATO, uh, activity, I call it almost like, uh, uh, flexing for social media, right? There, there's like this, like mainstream conversation, and you almost are trying to score points on social media to some degree, although not, you know, they, they don't count it in likes and retweets and all that. But society has shifted, and so there's not the, um, I, I don't know, I call it like, uh, top hat diplomacy, right, that we, that we may have expected 50, 60, 70 years ago. And, and they weren't perfect, but there definitely was this element of, uh, gentleman's diplomacy, diplomacy to some degree. And sure, there was negotiations. They would listen. There was a conversation. Uh, and yes, sometimes we did go to war, uh, obviously with the

• 55:38Anthony Pompliano?

  two world wars and, and things like that where there was disagreements. But it feels like this, to your point... Is something else like it almost feels like an unforced error that just came from the lack of diplomacy and so naturally it feels like you get war and maybe we didn't have to get this.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Well, it feels to me like there's cold warriors sort of calling the shots and we're in theory not in the Cold War and so it feels like there's guys who just can't come to terms with the idea that we don't have to oppose Russia with every ounce of our being. I just don't see what Russia's done to justify this. They say, oh, they took Crimea. I mean, these are border skirmishes by US standards. What happened to Monroe Doctrine? What about just saying, stay out of the Western Hemisphere dudes? And I just don't think it's

• 56:39Speaker 03

  our job to be patrolling the Baltic States, to be patrolling all these countries that are constantly changing borders, constantly, right? If you look at a map, you ever seen one of those dynamic maps where it shows the borders change over time? They're just flapping around constantly. It's Europe. Europe is a gigantic pile of tribalism and it's always been that way, right? Germany wasn't even a country until after the Middle Ages, right? Germany was just a bunch of bearded crazies running around the dark forests.

• 57:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Trying to invade ancient Rome.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Right, exactly, exactly, exactly. They were the only ones who didn't get conquered.

• 57:54Anthony Pompliano?

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  Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto crypto IRA to invest in Bitcoin and crypto tax free. Go to altoira.com/pomp. That's A L T O I R A dot com slash pomp. Start investing today. When you think about Afghanistan and our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I think by most people's standards was botched at best. How much of that fed into the Americans' lack of appetite to participate on the ground in Ukraine? Versus you think it's more of a generational, just it didn't matter if we had botched that or if we had withdrawn at that moment.

• 59:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The American citizen doesn't have nearly the appetite for war that maybe we once had decades ago.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Well, the term botch I would question because because it was so bad that it had to be intentional. It really had to be intentional. I swear that you and I could sit around with a six pack and come up with a better withdrawal. Right? In fact, we wouldn't need the six pack. The six pack would help. But and so if you look at every facet of the withdrawal, they left the weapons intact. They left the keys in the ignition. They left ballots of hundred dollar bills. They left an army that they said would defend the country. There's no and they lasted what about 30 seconds? There's no way the CIA didn't know that this army wasn't ready.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  There's no chance, no chance. They were on US payroll. The second we pulled out, they were going to go off US payroll. Guess what? You don't have an army if you're not paying them. And so, so nothing about it makes sense unless the idea is that what it really represents is us saying to the Taliban, here are the keys, we're leaving your weapons, behave yourselves, here's what we expect, and there's money to put gas in the vehicles, and, uh, and, uh, have a nice day. Now, the only thing I can't explain is why we had to do it in a way that was so humiliating.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  And that always takes me back to, how do you know where the motivation comes from when the President of the United States is so compromised? And I know those people won't agree with that, but he had dirty dealings in Ukraine, he had dirty dealings in China, who, who knows how many more he had around the world? If someone says, "Do it and do it ugly," and, and they own you, you do it and you do it ugly, right?

• 1:01:21Anthony Pompliano?

  When we look at, uh, the, I don't know, takeover of Afghanistan, uh, by the Taliban, uh, for, I don't know, the hundredth time, as empires have gone there and, and been unsuccessful, uh, the two things that stuck out in my head, one was, uh, a thought of history, and another was, uh, one that I read on the internet. And the thought of history was just, in the first time that we gave the Taliban weapons, right? It, it just, this time was, uh, more so they took them from us after we left them, versus us literally sending them, uh, to help arm the rebellion, you know, decades ago. Uh, but the other thing I read, um, and I, I want to say was from Tim Kennedy, uh, who

• 1:02:03Anthony Pompliano?

  is a, a, a former, uh, special forces sniper, or may still, still be, uh, active, um, but, but maybe it was from somebody else, and he said, "Listen, we have on national television videos of the Taliban sitting inside a building. There's a bunch of them sitting there. I got a great idea, let's just go drop a bomb. If we really, if we really, really feel like these people are threatened, we are at war with them."

• 1:02:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, why during the withdrawal are we basically, it appears to be getting more information, identifying where folks are, literally have a live video feed, all these different things, and we just walked away? And maybe that was part of the plan.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  That gets back to the fact that they could have turned it ugly fast. So, so, I mean, the surrealist moments of all were where we had US citizens outside the Air Force Base fence that we're not letting in, and they said, "Look, throw these people on planes, get them out of there," and Jen Psaki saying, "Well, we couldn't identify who was who," and I go, "Since when does that matter to you guys? You're bringing in gazillions over every border, best I can tell." So, and then they said they got 90% of people wanted to get out, out, and I'm going, "That

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  may be a good stat for a snowplow or something, but it's a bad stat for getting US citizens out of a hostile territory." And, and, and there was so matter of fact about that. And then there was, then there's this question, if you know you're going to pull out, why would you let, why would you give visas to a group of school kids to go on a big adventure in Afghanistan? Right? There's just nothing about the thing that makes sense. So, so when nothing makes sense, and it means the model's wrong, and you actually have a new model. My new model is, is that, and by the way, you know, you know, those, those US citizens left behind, have you seen any stories about the horrors that they went through afterward? Any?

• 1:04:09Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  None? Right? They're as silent as that as they are on the Vegas shootings, right? My favorite. And so, so it's not what it, it's not what we were told, and I don't know what it is, right? I don't know, the layer of the onion they're showing, this is not the right one. The layer of the onion I'm sitting at might not be the right one either.

• 1:04:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  There's times where I'm talking to my brother, I go, we talk about, okay, which, which event in history would you like the answer key to? Which is the one where you'd like to say, okay? Tell me what the hell just happened, right? When some people would say nine eleven, some would say, some would say, you know, Pearl Harbor, who knows what, but, but, but, but there's, there's these events. I, I don't even know if we know what history is anymore. I, I, I've, I've, you know, the, the, the press has been owned by the military for decades, long before they officially became prostitutes. They were still, uh, in bed with the military and, and it was considered the loyal thing to do. So, you know, during World War Two, you know, the movie theaters were putting out anti-Japanese,

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  anti-German cartoons and, you know, it's always been there, right? They, Japanese had Tokyo Rose, you know, whatever. Um, but now it's gotten to the point where the press's entire business model depends critically on whoring their way around, um, propaganda.

• 1:05:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Well, so the internet destroyed the press at some level. The conventional press got wiped out, right? And, uh, and so how are they paying the bills? And, and it's no longer Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite going on TV and telling us, um, what might not have been true, but we all were happy as hell thinking it was true. And on Sunday morning talk shows, you'd have five or six guys sitting around a table and you got the sense that they were discussing, um, important topics from different angles. And you had George Will with a super right wing thing and you had lefties, they would go back and forth and it was civilized debate and you, you got the feeling that, that, that

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  they were sort of peeling back layers to the onion for us. And you, you get none of that now. You don't get it on Fox News, you don't get it on, on CNN. Um, to the extent I lean right, I like the lies coming out of Fox News better. Um, I think there's one journalist who looks like, one conventional journalist who looks like he's trying to get it right and that's Tucker Carlson. I think, people think Fox is this homogeneous right wing machine and by no stretch of the imagination is it that. There's degrees, but there's the stupid talking heads who just are, are, are propaganda machines themselves. Um, but, but, but there's, I, I, depending on what time of day you're watching Fox News, you get a very different presentation of history.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  So, um, for the press, the presses, the press is now subsidized. And I think that probably, uh, they're kept alive by, um, by the political system. Right? And, um, they're kept alive by, um, 75% of their ad revenues come from pharma. So if you want to know how the hell we keep not getting a straight answer on things like vaccines and COVID, all you have to do is recognize that a, that pharma. My brother said something the other day that struck me as profound. You know, those TV commercials where they advertise a drug and you go, what the hell did they just tell me? Right? Mm-hmm. There's a bunch of old guys walking around with smiles on their face. What drug was that? My dog is killing me here.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  And she doesn't take no for an answer. He doesn't take no for an answer. Um, and, and you don't know what the drug was and you don't know why, you know? Oh yeah, I'm going to run off and take who the fuck cares, uh, right? And, and you wouldn't do that. And he said, no, I, I think what they're doing is that they're just advertising as a revenue stream. So if your pharma said having a lobbyist, you know, you say, okay, look, just throw, throw them some fucking ads. Right? Advertise our, you know, anal cream, right? I don't care what. Just advertise. And so 75% of the advertisement revenues are from pharma. Why?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Because then when you have some big catastrophe like Vioxx or, or Bextra or Nexium or any of, there's so many. Um, what you do is you say, uh, by the way, don't cover that story. And they don't cover the story. You think that's happening? Oh, by the way. You, you think it's happening? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Uh, you, you, was there on any TV show early on?

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  A debate about the pros and cons of vaccine? On any, on any mainstream press? Did a bunch of smart guys sit around a table on Sunday and say, well, you know, what are the pros and cons of vaccine? Let's consider, you know, risks of vac. You know, people don't seem to know this. The history of vaccines is a horrifying history. Not horrifying in terms of evil dudes.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Although there might be some of that, but just horrifying in terms of how hard it is to create a vaccine that doesn't slaughter people. It's a very difficult thing. And so there's books on vaccine production that predate COVID. They talk about all the failures that occur and how they've got vaccines for things in the military, but they can't use them because it kills, kills the guys. And, uh, and so making a vaccine is hard. Did anyone discuss that? Did anyone discuss in any way, shape or form, how, did, did any of the press talk about, now, now you can hear it now, but don't forget this is just recently. It's as though they've said, okay, we're done now. So go ahead, talk about it all you want. We don't care. But then early on, did anyone talk about, um, vaccine injuries?

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Did anyone, which are absolutely real, absolutely real. We just don't know the numbers because the authorities who would have to keep track of them, the, the big grand overarching group that would really be needed to keep track of all of them are a bunch of liars. And so they're not going to cover it. Nothing was covered. Nothing but propaganda. And so this gets back to the frontier justice part. There are some, there was a story the other day I read about a woman, about, um, two, one is a, one is a husband, wife team, talked about the kid, the husband didn't want to vaccinate, the wife did, she took the kid to get vaccinated, he got wiped out by it. Um, can imagine divorce court in their future.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Another is where they had a kid who, who had serious autoimmune issues. Their doctor and the family all agreed they're not going to vaccinate. The kid goes to school and they bribe him with pizza and they vaccinate him and fuck him up royally. Explain to me why that father doesn't go and blow someone's head off. It's not that I think he should. It's not that I think it would be good. It's not, it's that I don't understand statistically how these things are happening. And somehow the only shooters we get are random shooters who kill random people for no apparent reason. I don't, remember, remember the LA cop who declared war on the LA police department years ago?

• 1:11:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I don't want to guess at his name, but I think it was Eric something. Uh, I do remember and they, and they basically tracked them. They tracked them to like a cabin or something, right? I think he ended up.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  They burned him. They burned him.

• 1:11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  They set it on fire. Yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  I read his manifesto. He was not insane. He was not a loner. He was not isolated. He cared about life. He just decided he'd seen enough.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  I don't understand. Now, let's go to Uvalde. How do you have? So here's a town that's town of 15,000. It's 50 miles from a nearby bigger town. 70 miles or 80 miles from a different one. It's in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  And the number they says they had 370 cops there. How do you get? How do you get 370 cops? I don't understand that. What were they doing there? Right? So right away, the story starts getting flaky. And then you've got 77 minutes where a bunch of cops won't go in. And so, and the problem is the explanations don't make sense to me. So I say, oh, they're cowards. Really? I would think that you could pick 10 names out of a phone book. And one of those 10 would go in and say, fuck you. I'm not waiting. I hear gunshots. I'm going.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  And out of, out of all these cops, no one went in until supposedly some border guard went in and shot them.

• 1:12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you watch? Did you watch the hallway video?

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I watched it. And, you know, again, hindsight is 2020. And so obviously we know what happened. But given that we know and you're sitting there and you're watching it. Your blood just boils. You just are getting, you're just getting so mad.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  I just don't think it could be true.

• 1:13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think it is?

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  I don't have, I don't know. I have been bothered by all the shootings for years now. For years I've been bothered. The shootings all follow similar patterns. The man on the street who gets interviewed minutes after it occurred are always talking about multiple shooters and they go away and all of a sudden it's a single lone shooter. By the way, have you ever seen a detailed discussion?

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Of one of the shooters' lives? You ever seen anyone talk about what led up to it? What was the setup? No, you see a drug-addled kid in court, looking wacky as shit, getting convicted, sent away, or getting executed, or whatever. And you get no insight. You get no backdrop, you get no anything. And, again, my favorite, if you want to dig into it, the Vegas shooting was a complete fraud. It's the most extraordinary story. I wrote about 20 pages on it, and I only got about 20% of the story.

• 1:14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know much about that one. What happened?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Well, there's two documentaries now, which you can go on. If you go on Rumble, Rumble or Bitshoot, you can't get it on YouTube, because of course they won't let it be there. And what happened is Stephen Paddock supposedly shot some like 1,500 rounds out of a 34-story window in the Mandalay Bay, right? Right away, the chief of police, who apparently wasn't given the plot in advance, said, "There's no way, it's not humanly possible for one person to shoot this many rounds." Then, within a day, saying it's only one shooter. But it turns out that there's... The documentaries, one thing that I pick up right away is that they kept interviewing the same guy over and over and over.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  The networks were using one guy. There were 20,000 people there. But somehow, a guy named Mike Cronk was the only guy who kept getting interviewed. And YouTube kept rolling to the next interview, like it does, you know, 15 seconds later. And there's Mike Cronk again, new network, same guy, his story's drifting. It started out with him saying his buddy got shot three times in the chest. Now, a marksman told me, "From that distance, you can't get shot three times in the chest, unless the guy's a sniper."

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  And, and uh, because there's too much spray. And um, and then the guy, Mike Craxton, about his friend sticking his fingers in his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding. I'm going, no. Right away, that was my bullshit meter. That was my bullshit moment. And then you start listening to audios, which by the way, we're getting deleted off YouTube as fast as you can find them. Um, audios, you can just hear all sorts of weapons going off. Just tons of, that, that, that, that, and whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. You know, you hear all these different, guys took the recordings, they pulled all the different weapons apart. Said, here, here's one that's superimposed on another, here's one. And um, Stephen Paddock had no history of guns or anything.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  I think, I think he might have been a gun runner. That's my suspicion. But I think he took the first, first bullet. And the question is, um, and then there was, there's always the post thing that occurs. Remember in January 6th, when four cops committed suicide? You go, what? Four cops committed suicide after January 6th? Well, there was a bunch of very strange deaths of people who survived the original shooting too. Like six or seven people out of 20,000 within a month were dead. You go, what's that all about? I, I don't know. I just know, so if you find the videos, if you find the documentary on the Las Vegas shooting, I bet you the rumble and you watch it. You'll see the problem. There was shooting all up and down the strip.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  There was literally a lady walking through the crowd, saying to people, in 45 minutes, you're all gonna die. I mean, just strange shit like this. And there's, there's, there's taxi cab footage where the guy's going, he's shooting out of the fourth floor window. Ah, shooting out of this, he's shooting out of that. There's video footage of the cops going into the room and saying, turn off your cameras, right? That's the favorite trick. And then one guy didn't turn off his camera and that survived. And you're in there and they, they say there's no broken windows, then you hear a window smash. Uh, it, it just surreal shit. It just doesn't make sense. So, and then the question is, okay, the biggest shooting since the Civil War. The biggest shooting since the Civil War.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  When was the last time someone mentioned it in their rallying cry to get rid of guns? Never. Right? You don't, you don't know shit about it because it's old and who cares? Well, the reason they don't care is because they botched it badly enough that, that it can't be used as a rallying cry. They don't want anyone looking at it. The guy, the, you know, the guy got shot in the leg, the security guard who was actually on the floor where paddock was? He supposedly got shot in the leg. Um. Trauma surgeon said, by the way, these weapons do a special kind of damage. You bleed out just from a leg shot. Just because it turns your leg to jello supposedly, but, but this guy gets shot in the leg. Next thing you know, reporters are trying to get to his house and there's a bunch of

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  cars without license plates in front of them. The house is protected. Next thing you know, you find out he has several social security numbers. Next thing you know, he's in, he's in Mexico. When asked about him going to Mexico, I said, well, he planned a vacation. I go, you know, I think letting him go to Mexico was probably not a good move. And then he comes back. He does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres, which is owned, her show's owned by Mandalay Bay. And, uh, uh, uh, the whole story is nuts from head to toe. So here's the problem. Once you see one plot like this, if your moment was Pearl Harbor, couldn't have been Pearl Harbor, the way it went down. Um. Uh, you know, nine 11, whatever it is, once you, once you wrap your brain around one of them,

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  there are no, there's nothing to constrain you from pondering crazy ass ideas. And so you can't say, oh, that would never happen. You, you can no longer say that. And there's just too many of these. There's, there's too many things that just don't make sense. You know, there's, I don't know shit about it, but you know, the Israelis sunk one of our destroyers. And no one ever talks about that except for the guys who care about it. Um. You know, it, it's been going on since the dawn of time. The Lusitania was a setup, right? I, I don't think we started a war without some sort of. False flag initiation of the war. I

• 1:19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So Dave, let me ask you this question because I think a lot of people who who listen to this right that there's

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  I'm probably melting their circuits, unfortunately.

• 1:19:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, unfortunately, in society, there's basically a move to the extremes. Right. And so there's some people who I imagine are listening to this and they're sitting there shaking their head like, yes, he gets it. He, you know, he's, he's talking about the things that I believe I see.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  And others think I'm nuts.

• 1:20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And then there's others that that are like, oh, my God, this guy is an absolute insane, you know, extremist, conspiracy theorist, etc. How do you balance?

• 1:20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe rationality when it comes to things that you are confused by because what I'm hearing you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is, hey, there's a bunch of stuff that seems really weird, but I don't have the answer, right? It's not like you're saying, hey, the story you're being told is A, but really the story is B. What I hear you saying is, I got details, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, and they don't add up to me. And now I'm confused and I don't know what to think. So how do you kind of maybe go through the world as we have so much access to information where there are a lot of things that don't seem to add up? Like, do you just sit and think about them all day? Do you just throw your hands up and say, I'm not going to solve it and like, let me move on to the next one? Like, how do you kind of just navigate all this?

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Well, after a while, they they get matter of fact. So I'll see something. I'll see some stat about the vaccine killing people. I go, I know, I'm done. I I've come to terms with. So I write about it, right? One of the things I do is I write about it. If if your ideas are incoherent, writing about it tends to reveal that. And now, it's not to say I'm not clever enough to write a plot. I did a podcast recently with a guy whose worldview and mine don't match up. And and he knows a ton of facts. But in some sense, we all have like this Christmas tree, we hang the ornaments off it. What we do agree is that the world's screwed up.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  He just has, he has this sort of Davos leaning and I say, I think China's involved, you know, and we disagree on that. And the problem is you can reach a point where you've got a model that's robust enough that you can make anything hang off it. And it doesn't mean it's right. As a chemist, by way of background, I went into a very complicated field that some thought we'd never understand and some thought they did. And for 40 years, I've discovered over and over and over that what experts who are really trying to get it right, got dead wrong. They asked the wrong questions. You wouldn't believe things where I can say to a freshman, here's why this isn't even

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  possibly a valid argument, right? And you go, ah shit, I hadn't thought of that. And so it's a very complex field and just 40 years of relentlessly showing that what people thought was not true. I'm finishing a paper right now in which there's probably 500 papers in the literature all use the same mechanistic model to explain it. And it was just in a different zip code when you actually dug into it. So I'm comfortable with the idea that experts can be wrong. And over the years, I've gotten comfortable with the idea that psychopathic people conspire.

• 1:23:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Last time we talked about this.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. You know, you know, you know who's nuts? The guys who think that people who are in positions of power don't conspire. Those people need a CAT scan. They just, there's just no chance that's not true, right?

• 1:23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to extrapolate this maybe to financial markets, is the same thing true, right? That the non-financial markets are crazy, there's all these, you know, things that don't make sense. And then when we look at the financial markets, same thing. We saw major banks getting in trouble for manipulating markets. We've seen, you know, issue after issue after issue. How much of it's true in finance as well?

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  Well, the finance, I don't, I don't get as dark in the sense that.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  You see greed and corruption, but it's, it's, at some level, it's kind of garden riot. It's not a massive scale. The other thing is, there's, there's a non-trivial number of instances where what people attribute to nefarious dark forces are just twenty-somethings in cubicles, running markets around like crazy and just, you know, bidding it up and then bidding it down. And they're, they're committing crimes, of course. You know, they're spoofing and stuff like that. But, um, the bailouts of the banks, um, at, at some level, you say, well, of course they're going to bail out themselves, right? Who wouldn't bail out yourself?

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  And so, uh, I, I think the markets, um, what has changed is that they've gotten so financialized.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  I, I, on Twitter, you'd be hard pressed to find someone beyond Jesse Felder and John Hussman talking about valuations. I, I do it all the time. And, and the, the problem is, is valuation doesn't tell you anything about timing. So I've been ranting about valuations for a long time. I think valuations sort of escaped the gravitational pull of, of, of the earth or tried to escape it, starting in 94. So I think we've been drifting further and further from what I'd call a credible valuations since literally 94.

• 1:25:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I, I, I looked at 25 metrics of valuation. I do every few years, just to touch base. And in 2021, I did it. And, and, you know, if you're, if your favorite valuation is PE, may God have mercy on your soul, they can fake those like there's no tomorrow. But I use 25, they have to do with price to book, price to revenue, price to Tobin's Q, composite valuations, price earnings, you name it. Um, there's a whole bunch of them and they all kind of point to the same number of about, as of the end of 2021, we're sort of 110 to 150% overvalued, historical fair value. Now, what's noticeable...

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  Is that if you look at all these valuation charts and if people are interested, go to my pinned tweet. It's in there. Um, what's noticeable is they all seem to peel away from historical metrics around 1994. And, and, uh, and what you can see is that, uh, corporate debt took off in 1994 and didn't look back. Um, corporate debt as a percentage of GDP, you know, normalized to things that it shouldn't take off. Um, that's part, in part the credit cycle, of course. Um, but, but that now here we are with 20% of the S and P being zombies. Right?

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  And, and if 20% of the S and P can't pay their, their debt with their cash flow, the S and P should be priced a lot lower. And, um, and it's not, right? What happens when those 20% default on their debt? I don't know.

• 1:27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it possible? Is it possible for us to get there? Or is the constant intervention in markets obfuscating that to the background? And so, uh, yes, prices matter, but maybe we can't look at the historical measurements as like, that's actually where we could fall back to?

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Well, then you can't look at historical returns either then. That got presented to me by my smart friend sitting at dinner that night. And, uh, he said, maybe your historical metrics are no longer valid. And I said, therefore, historical returns are no longer valid. If, if you're paying twice for a revenue stream than you used to pay, long-term sustainable is, is, uh, you can't get a good return. Right? It's like if you buy a, a 30-year bond right now, you know what you're going to get off that bond. And you can trade it if you want. I'm not, I'm not a trader. I'm not talking about trading. Trading is, uh, trading is part of the problem, right? There's so much money sloshing around that it has become the market.

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  But it's not about investing and, and, um,

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  And so if you buy a 30-year bond right now, what's the return on it? 3%, 3-something, 5-something? What, I, I, I lose track of these. Um, I guess the 10-year's close to 3.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Let's use the 10-year. If you buy a 10-year bond, it's going to return 3%. It's a predictable return. You've overpaid for that bond.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Right? And if you think, oh, I'm going to sell it to some sucker, you go have a ball, but, but that's not invested.

• 1:28:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  And someone has to own that bond all the way to the end.

• 1:28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What does your portfolio look like now? Like, what, what's the makeup, uh, percentage-wise?

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Um, I did some jiggling at the end of 2020, actually. Um, my portfolio is probably 35%. Maybe as much as 40% precious metals.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  There's, I have some money in a, in a place that I count, but I don't control. And it's a, it's an old man's, you know, 30-70 fund sort of thing. And, and I have no say in it. And I, I counted at the end of the year, but, um, so that's sort of generic. That's about one-seventh of my wealth. Um, that was an inherited chunk.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  I, I moved into energy at the end of 2020, which was an absolute bottom call, if that was the bottom, right? You never know when it's the bottom, but if that was the bottom, I nailed it. I didn't size it like Druckenmiller, so, um, I never do. I, I always average in and, uh, every once in a while, I say, I think it's probably a good time to add some more energy. Um, I think, I think we're looking at an energy bull market somewhere in the energy sector for, for decades. The problem is, I don't, I don't know how to play it. I don't know if it's energy services companies. I don't, I, I think you want to avoid energy companies that have to develop energy sources going forward in a big way.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Because I think, I think the politics makes that almost impossible now. So I think you want to, I think you want to buy energy companies that in some sense are almost like royalty trusts, where they've already got their pipes, they've got the refineries, they've got their, their wells, and they can keep pumping the energy out of the ground.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  I have a lot of cash. That was fine. I didn't mind missing opportunity, but now the inflation is causing trouble. So that I've been desperate to figure out how to handle that. I own no Bitcoin, as you probably surmised. It's not that I don't think it could do well. It's just not me. I just finished Morgan Housel's book on the psychology of money, and he gets at that point very much. He says, "What's completely sane for you is insane for me," and vice versa. There's no right and wrong on some of these things. Some of these things are how you're wired. I'm not wired for Bitcoin because it would take me too long to understand it, and I would never forgive myself if I lost a bunch of a serious amount of money. And I would totally forgive myself for not buying

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  it, because, well, for starters, I passed on it at 10 bucks per coin, and I would have sold it at 50, and then I would have been in psychotherapy for the next 20 years. And then, yeah, a lot of fixed income sort of stuff.

• 1:31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you look out over the next 12 months, 18 months, we started the conversation off with the Fed's going to continue to hike rates, potentially, if they did grow a spine until things break. Are you doing anything different now, or kind of preparing for worse times? Or just the portfolio you have is the portfolio you have?

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Well, I am prepared for worse times. What is different? It's not different, and, you know, eternity different. You know, it's not that this time it's different as in unique, although I would argue the markets are uniquely frothy. I would say they've a new high watermark for crazy. What I'm preparing for, what I blew in 08, 09, was that I was totally ready for it, but I thought there had to be much more damage. And in defense of that view, is that I don't think anybody could have foreseen the level of intervention. And remember when the Fed essentially bailed out...

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  Bailed out the system by putting thirty billion into JP Morgan to take Bear Stearns.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  That sucked the oxygen out of the room, thirty billion. People were stunned by that. And now we're throwing trillions around, literally trillions. And so I would say that the Fed has gone completely out of orbit in terms of their willingness to intervene. They just didn't do that before. And I did not see that coming. And so I saw, I saw what came out of the oh nine low is just a dead cap bounce. I thought, I thought we're going to be looking at a highly damaging ninety percent correction. And if you buy a ninety percent, if you buy a ninety percent correction after the first fifty, you still lost, let me do some quick math, eighty percent of your money.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Or as Einhorn said one night at dinner to a tech bull. It's a well-known phrase, but this guy was too naive to know it. He said, you know, you know what a ninety percent correction is? He says a ninety percent correction is where you get an eighty percent correction, then it gets cut in half. He says, he says, you have no experience with something that gets cut by ninety percent or ninety seven percent. Einhorn lit into the guy. And

• 1:34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the guy's response?

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  He was just frothing at the high profit margins of, of, of tech, not recognizing that that idea that regression to the mean is a force of nature and profit, high profit margins get scooped up and, and dealt with because if it's a high profit margin, competitors can jump in and cause you trouble. And, and so what you really, my dad, when I was a kid taught me, he said, he went into a business that was capital intensive during the seventies, right? Where capital was expensive. And I said, why did you go into that business? He was a contractor, but this was a weird offshoot for him. He said, well, besides the fact I think I can make money is that the fact that it's so

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  capital intensive sort of protects me against a wildcat or because a shitty businessman can't get the capital to do this. He says, I can compete with a credible businessman. We can both play in the same field. Says, it's the guy who undercuts me and destroys us both simultaneously that I can't deal with. So he was describing a moat, right? And, and capital constraint is a moat for those who have access to capital.

• 1:35:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  And what the Fed did is the Fed took our savings, which used to be the capital, right? Savings was capital. And they said, they took away that role of, of savings as, as capital. And they said, look, you don't need to, you don't need to borrow from Dave. We'll lend it to you. And so they, they, they made, they, they started by making my capital worth less. And then they've reached the point where they're risking making it, causing my capital to be worthless.

• 1:36:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:36:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  chain.com domain or visit unstoppable domains.com to buy your domain today starting as low as $5 unstoppable domains.com as we watch everything play out around the world deglobalization seems to be a major theme reshoring of manufacturing supply chains even potentially labor seems to be something that over the last two and a half years has become a more obvious thing what's the impact on financial markets kind of like the macro trends for the next 10 15 20 years do you feel like deglobalization and reshoring of some of these things will change where returns can be captured or is this still the same thing just go buy great

• 1:38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  businesses and don't worry about some of these kind of macroeconomics maybe like a Peter Lynch and if you spend 15 minutes on macroeconomics you spent 13 minutes too many

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  I think the globalization reshoring will be massively inflationary

• 1:38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  okay so so you know this Murray stall at Horizon kinetics said the age of monetary policy is over

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  so that miracle Russian resources Chinese labor credit cycle of 40 years that provided a tailwind for the equity markets the boomer demographics Peter Zeon is a total demographic account and when your demographics are favorable which they were for the last 40 years then you've got this this massive workforce just showing up and cranking shit out daily right and and you have a relatively small percentage of the population who were consumers and only consumers we're now heading into an aging global population but certainly in the United States but I'm China

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  supposedly is much worse where you got a growing number of consumers who are expecting to have things done for them and they don't they don't have to pull on the or anymore they were retired and and so you're going to have demand for goods and services and a smaller number to provide them that's a highly inflationary setup so whatever your model is going forward I think it better deal with that problem and the other thing inflation does is it it shifts money into the hands of the rich because because financialization certainly doesn't help Joe Sixpack

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  And, and we could have all sorts of strife. All sorts of stress, all sorts of populism, all sorts of dumb presidents, right? And so I, it's, it's not to say that it had.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Charlie, would you please shut up? I'm getting you off, go, go defend yourself. Um. Wait a minute, where the fuck is he? There he is, right there. I got three dogs, only one's been a pain right now. Um.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  This too shall pass, right?

• 1:40:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Speaker 03

  But it's, but you know, you know, the depression was only 10 years. I, I argue the depression's 15. Um, I got in an argument with a Stanford economist who said, no, no, you're wrong about that. I, I said that, you know, low consumption during World War II, blah, blah, blah. And he said, no, the, the GDP during World War II went up 15%, something like that. And, and after about 10 years, I, I took him on in writing. I said, no, your GDP number is wrong because GDP should include depreciation of assets. So if you crank out a drill, you could get 10 years out of that drill. If you go to the movies, you get two hours out of that movie.

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  So they just are not equivalent contributors to GDP. Um, and, uh, and World War II's GDP might've been rocking, but we were making battleships and bombs and planes and stuff like that. And the depreciation rate on those was measured in, in very short time scales. Now, what we did do during World War II is we, we made great progress towards improving mass production. So we took what Henry Ford did and we put it on steroids. And so that was the, uh, was what World War II left us with, was a highly functional economy in a world filled with unfunctional economies. And so, so we were wealthy at the end of World War II, but, but, but, but World War II was,

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  I think, the blow off of the depression, but it passed. So you say, okay, so this too shall pass. But people suffered. Right? World War II passed, but people suffered. The Civil War passed, but people suffered. And so, you know, if you went and stomped on an anthill in your backyard, you could stop on it all goddamn day and the next day go out there and there should be an anthill there. But there'd be a lot of dead ants too.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  I don't want to be one of those, right?

• 1:42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And you think that's basically what, uh, what is likely to happen here is that, uh, this too shall pass, but there'll be a lot of suffering, uh, for various groups in between now and then.

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. I mean, depression unemployment was 25%. I mean, there were parents giving away their kids. There were, it was an awful time for some people. And you just don't want to be that person. So you have to prepare not to be that person somehow.

• 1:42:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things, um, before we wrap up that, that I found, uh, absolutely fascinating was back in 2020, uh, I think it was in the, towards, uh, the middle or end of March, I wrote a piece and I said, um, unemployment could basically eclipse the Great Depression unemployment numbers. And this was the week before we got the first 6.6 million of unemployment claims in a single week, right? So right before it skyrocketed.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, what I had done is I went and I just analyzed a bunch of different sources that I found that were telling me, uh, at county levels or even at certain state levels, uh, of layoffs and, uh, of what they perceived to be, uh, this incoming gigantic leap. And so it made me go look at the Great Depression unemployment numbers and everyone knows the 25% number because that's the big headline number. But actually it took three years before it got up over, uh, 20%. I think it was something, you know, it was around, uh, historic low, you know, kind of mid 3%, then it jumped to like eight, then it was like 15, and then eventually we got up over 20 and it stayed there for quite a while. It was like, I think it was three or four years where we were above 20% unemployment. And

• 1:44:03Anthony Pompliano?

  so the point that I was trying to make at the time was just like, look, you don't have to ever hit 25% to have as bad unemployment or worse than the Great Depression. And if you look back at the numbers, the official numbers from, uh, kind of this COVID situation, we had to 14% unemployment in the United States. Right?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Well, even if you believe those numbers too, um, you would have tough time arguing that 2020.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  That we created any wealth whatsoever.

• 1:44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  Right? We didn't produce anything. People weren't building houses. They weren't building buildings. Uh, things were shut down. Research programs and pharmaceuticals were shut down. Oh, there's wealth creation, maybe. Um, and, um, and, uh,

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  a- a- and yet somehow at the end of the year, what was the market up that year?

• 1:44:55Anthony Pompliano?

  In, uh, last year.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  Twenty twenty? Twenty twenty, I think it was up like fifteen percent or something.

• 1:45:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and then in twenty twenty one, it was up like, I think, twenty eight, thirty percent, something like that.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  Right. That, the market has to at some level track GDP.

• 1:45:11Speaker 03

  It's, it, you can't, you, you can't grow the market faster than you grow wealth, which is crudely speaking GDP. And, and so, um, and the GDP numbers are sketchy. There's a great book, by the way, in case someone's still listening to our podcast, um, by Robert Gordon on wealth creation. And he said that eighteen seventy to nineteen forty was a phenomenal period of wealth creation. There's these primary inventions like electricity and things like that. And then there's what, what he calls secondary inventions, which is, you know, appliances. And so they spin off. And he said, oddly enough, the best decade ever for secondary inventions was the nineteen thirties.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  We created a lot of wealth in the nineteen thirties. Um, and, uh, and, um, and he said, then it, then it goes pretty flat. I, I got two dogs to work, I mean, uh, then it goes pretty flat from nineteen forty to sort of nineteen seventy. And then, uh, and then he said, it's, it's, it's just pancakes. That real wealth creation, just pancakes like crazy going forward. He said, there was a blip from the decade from ninety five to two thousand and five, which was the tech thing. He said, but then it just flattens out again. And, and, uh, and, and he draws some real interesting analogies. What is really transformational wealth?

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  And you can say, ah, look at Amazon. Well, I would say more transformational than Amazon was the Sears robot catalog. The Sears robot catalog was, was the prototype of Amazon. You got this catalog, you can order anything of, any one of 10,000 things. Before that, you had to go to your, your, your country store and buy nails out of a barrel, shit like that. And you could buy prefab houses and shit through the Sears robot catalog, parts for your car. It was Amazon. So, Amazon is not as transformational as Sears. And, and, and we, we brought electricity, you know, the Wright brothers, one of the Wright brothers lived to see, god damn these dogs, lived to see jets.

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  Oh my god. How is that possible? How do you, how do you go from inventing air flight to seeing jets in, in, in your lifetime? And so, I, I think that the modern economy is hugely

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  a hollowed out thing, right? So, you got Tesla, which is inventing ideas, but, but the actual wealth creation is, is, is still hard to detect. Um, this market cap is way out of proportion to what it actually produces. Uh, you've got Facebook, that if it went away today, the world would be a better place. You got, what, Netflix. Netflix is a poor man's HBO. Charlie, get the fuck out of here. Um, he is a, uh, Boston Terriers that are half Bulldog, half carrier. The Bulldog part shows up occasionally.

• 1:48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The, Dave, real quick, the book that you're talking about is called The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon, and

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  That's brilliant. It's brilliant.

• 1:48:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and in the description on Amazon, uh, it says, "In the century of the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years." And then it says Gordon "challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can't be repeated." He contends that "the nation's productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education,

• 1:49:09Anthony Pompliano?

  an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government."

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  So, so, and, and the people who have iPhones and stuff are going, "Well, that's just not true." But you go, "Okay, um, tell me how many times you have to do something online where it doesn't frustrate the shit out of you." Things that just shouldn't have been put online, that now is online, and, and, and, you know, I, I'm always amazed how many websites would benefit from just looking at how Amazon puts their website together. So, I, I give them full credit for optimizing what it is they do. I think they've done a phenomenal job. But there, there are so many, again, Netflix baffles me. And, and then we replace Exxon from the Dow with Salesforce.com. What the hell is Salesforce.com? People say, "Oh, it's cloud this or cloud that." And I go, "Then how about Google if

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  you want to do it?" Why would you put in Salesforce.com? And, and I think they are, that they're, they're, they're translucent companies. They're just, it's just not that good, in my opinion. And, and, and, and, they're not transformational. I, I mean, progress is always forward. Even during the inflationary 70s, progress moved forward. You know, and transistors were invented and stuff like that. I can't remember, the 60s, I guess, was the transistor. But, um, the other thing, Buffett recently, I'm not a big Buffett fan. I respect his

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  ability to, to grow wealth, not grow wealth, grow, uh, personal wealth, um, not create wealth. But he, he, he pointed out that, um, that five of the six biggest companies in the world are US-based companies. And if you look at them, they are these translucent type companies. Um, not that they haven't, "Are you barking now, you fuckhead?" Jesus Christ. And, um, and, uh, but he pointed out, he said, "If you look back 20 years, here's the 20 biggest companies in the world," or 30 years, um, "and 14 of the 20 were Japanese."

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  And he said, "30 years from now, it'll look that different again." So here's a guy who's always saying, "Oh, never bet against America," who's saying 30 years from now, the five out of the six biggest companies will not be American.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  And, and, and so in some sense, he's, he's trashing himself. He's trashing his own model. And, uh, so the next thirty, the other thing, I keep going back to Zihan book. Zihan got into my skull last week. Um, um, it's, it, he, he's worth paying attention to. I, I, I don't, I, I, I shouldn't talk about him because I'm still working my way through it, but Zihan's thinking is that he's overconfident, but he's, he's, um, he's worth listening to. Um, never mind. Um, I, the future will not look like the past. That's a safe statement.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  Um, I, I think this next recession will be a killer because we have too much debt. The Federal Reserve has no ammo to fake our way out of it. Um, oh, and I kept trying to get to a thought that, um, those three things that occurred, four or five things that occurred momentarily over the last forty years that won't repeat. One of the things they did is they created an equity market. It was this relentless series of V-bounces.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  So the market would try to correct and then it would bounce right back. And someone who says that a twenty percent drop that rallies back to where it was before within a year. If, if you want to call that a correction, have a ball, it corrected nothing, precisely nothing. All it did was reinforce the idea that you can't lose investing in stocks. Now, oh, guy you want to pay attention to, very, very off radar, off screen, uh, is got him Ed McQuarrie at UC Irvine. And he's analyzed markets back a couple hundred years.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  And, and he talks about, you know, equities and bonds, they break even. Ben Graham said that too. They break even. The only, if you take the bond market disaster post-World War II, you know, mid a couple of decades there, the 200 years, equities and bonds tie each other. And, and Graham said, anyone who, who thinks equities necessarily beat bonds in return is delusional. Now, maybe, maybe things have changed now, but regression to the mean will occur, it always does. And if you look at something that's way, way, way off any sort of historical metric, I don't know when, but you gotta assume it's gonna

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  regress. The bet as to when is dangerous, but the bet, to bet that it won't regress, that's the most dangerous.

• 1:54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it, it's the mean for a reason, right?

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, it's, in fact, what the Fed has done is prevented it from, from ever going below the mean. You know, the markets weren't even that cheap in 08, 09. They, they, they were below fair value for about a month. And I said it when I was at a dinner with, um, Mark Spitznagel, who's, who's one of these deep zen types. Um, and he concurred, and Jeremy Grantham too. They both said, look, they were below fair value for the, the shortest period of time. So, so if the horrific collapse of everything caused the markets to spend

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  a month below fair, historical fair value, what did you correct? And people, you know, when the markets were down 20%, people would ask me, colleagues, ah, the markets are down 20%, I'm getting real nervous. I said, okay, if a year and a half ago, I told you that you would not make any money over the next year and a half, would you have shit your pants? The answer is no. They'll say, yeah, that would be fine. Well, I said, that's what you just did. But the message also is we haven't corrected anything. We unwound a year and a half of fraud. We haven't even gotten back to the, I'm not even sure we're back to the pre-COVID peak.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Which was already at disastrously high peak. And so I think we're gonna unwind. I think the S and P is gonna unwind sub 2000.

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  I, I, I had something jar me a little bit yesterday. That made me wonder if my math's a little off, but I, I, I, I actually think we could get that to 1200.

• 1:56:12Anthony Pompliano?

  1200?

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's that far out of whack. 1200 would be below historic. Fair value. Comfortably below.

• 1:56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  There, there's people right now who are gonna hear you say that and they're gonna go shut their computer and wa, go for a walk outside.

• 1:56:26Speaker 03

  Well, go, go look at my pinned tweet, look at the 25 metrics evaluation. And ask if you unwind those. I, I think the 25 point to about a 65% correction. Where does that get you to? Get you to the mid teens. And, and that only gets you to the mean. And you and I both know that you're supposed to spend half your statistically weighted time below the mean. For it to be the mean. So you can say, ah, the means now change. Okay. Um, Ed, not, um, um, um, Ron Greece.

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  And he goes by the name, the Chart Master. Sent me a plot one day that I'd never seen, and I've never seen anyone else post it, and I don't know why. It is the return of the, uh, of the S and P over the 20th century, the last 100 years. Corrected for the M2 money supply. And it's dead flat. It's not gently sloping, it's dead flat. Is it possible? That that's the way to correct for inflation? That's a Milton Friedman correction, right? That's money supply.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Is it possible? That the actual capital gains on the market through the last 100 years? Are zero corrected for M2?

• 1:57:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably.

• 1:57:49Speaker 03

  What that means is all you get are dividends. And the evidence that we're way over fair value is that the dividends are half what they used to be. They used to be around four, four and a half.

• 1:58:01Speaker 03

  Now they're terrible.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  But I do see opportunity. A bad secular bear market will hurt everybody.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  But if you're super patient, I think the energy sector looks good. I would rather buy it in a horrific sell off.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  But the inflation's got me a little edgier than normal.

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  The lost asset class, I keep throwing this out and it makes no difference. The lost asset class is platinum and platinum miners. Go look up the three biggest platinum miners, Sabanya, Imperial, and Anglo American Platinum. And they have dividend yields in the high single digits, net cash in the balance sheet. P E's of five. When I asked a friend at RBC for more information on them, because I'm sitting there going, what am I missing? And by the way, this is with platinum not having moved in 20 years. So they're printing money without platinum helping them.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  And I asked a friend from RBC for some of their inside information and the data he sent me was five years old. And I said, that's all you got? And he said, that's it.

• 1:59:21Speaker 03

  So they're not even being looked at.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  And so I own some of the platinum miners. They've gotten cheaper since I bought them.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  And maybe there's geopolitical risk in South Africa.

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  There's geopolitical risk in every country, best I can tell.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  And so there's that.

• 1:59:45Speaker 03

  I used to be a big fan of the tobacco stocks, not morally, but financially. But then they went and bought vape companies. I kind of screwed that pooch.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  There are things out there that you could buy if a gun got put to my head. I still think, I think the bear market has started. I think the secular bear market has started.

• 2:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

  How long can it go?

• 2:00:10Speaker 03

  How long can Nikkei go?

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  I would argue the Nikkei is still in a bear market.

• 2:00:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I knew you would argue that.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Well, if you own the Nikkei in 1989, you're still underwater.

• 2:00:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Speaker 03

  To me, to me, the definition of a recession being the downturn is bullshit. A recession, if you think about what, what the recession, the physical interpretation of a recession is a dip, a hole, a pivot, a divot from your, your sand wedge.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  You're not out of a recession until you're out of the hole. If you're in a sand trap on the up slope, are you out of the trap? No. So to me, a recession should include both the downturn and the upturn required to get back to even.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  That's a recession thing. The Nikkei, if you, if you bought, if you own the Nikkei in 1989, you're a 55-year-old businessman. It's now, it's now 30 some odd years later, you're an 88-year-old businessman.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  And you're underwater.

• 2:01:21Speaker 03

  Right? You're not a businessman, by the way. You're just a broke old guy. And, and you couldn't trade it. I think the markets could become uninvestable. Let's say the Nikkei was the known universe.

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  Let's say that's all you had, but it's a big markets. It was the most famous country of its time for investing.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  You couldn't do anything with the Nikkei for, for decades. There was no way to invest it.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  And, and, and I got, I got into a George Noble, who's way smarter than me, but, and he said, well, you get short. I said, no, you couldn't. Took too long. The erosional cost would kill you. He said, well, you can do this and that. And he has all these fancy things. He said, now you're talking professional class investing or trading. Said, we can't do that. I can't do that. Very few people can do that. And, um, so I think the markets could become uninvestable. The markets were uninvestable in, uh, from 67 to 81. They treaded water inflation unadjusted. They lost 75% inflation adjusted. Over 14 years. How old are you now?

• 2:02:34Anthony Pompliano?

  34.

• 2:02:36Speaker 03

  So, so, so when you're 50 years old and you've gone nowhere inflation, you've gone down 75% inflation adjusted.

• 2:02:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  It's crazy. And the average investor doesn't know that's possible. They've been told that can't happen. Jeremy Siegel, by the way, Ed McCoury tears Jeremy Siegel a new one from head to toe. So Ed McCoury wrote a couple of papers on this and they're really, he sends them to me. I don't know how he picked me out. Um, maybe I sent him an email.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  But in investing is just not supposed to be this profitable. It's, it's Buffett said 4% a year. He said, when you take out all the fees, everything, 4% a year. Jeremy Grantham just quoted that same number in a podcast I listened to recently. 4%.

• 2:03:25Anthony Pompliano?

  If we buy AMC stock though, we're gonna, we're gonna just go to the moon.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  The moon and back, yeah.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  It's that crazy. It'll be like, uh, I do an analogy between, what's that one with, uh, Sandra Bullock where gravity?

• 2:03:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 2:03:40Speaker 03

  I said, this is not like gravity. You're not gonna get up and stagger away on some beach somewhere at the end of the movie. Right?

• 2:03:49Speaker 03

  So, I, I, I've become rather dark, I, I must admit. Um, but I'm positioned such that unless the inflation really finds a way to shred me. And by the way, the fact that the metals are not responding at all is rather stunning. Gold miners look cheap to me. The gold miners are printing money now.

• 2:04:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think, um, the one thing I'll say is, uh, most of the assets that people would have thought would be inflation hedge assets, uh, that is true. Except for if you're in a liquidity crisis. And what I think we are watching is exactly what we saw in 20, uh, 2008. And I've talked about this over and over again, and you know, frankly, uh, people who understand what happened then and understand how liquidity crisis worked, they kind of nod their head and say, yep, okay, that makes sense. People who don't just latch on to the fact that, uh, an asset can only be an inflation hedge or not, right? It's just this black and white thing. And if you go back to 2008, gold went down 30%. And that didn't mean that it wasn't a, a safe haven. It didn't mean that it wasn't a non-correlated asset over a long period of time, any of that stuff.

• 2:04:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It just meant that for those six months of the summer of 08, when it went down 30%, along with everything else, there was liquidity crisis and correlations went to one. Or close to one.

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  You sell whatever you can.

• 2:05:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  And, and, uh, and, uh, you know, and I was a kid, I, I might've told you this in a previous podcast, I was having a conversation with my dad. He was a great, street level economist, running a construction business that survived.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  And at one point, I said to him, I said, so you could get wealthy buying real estate in the 30s. This is in high school, I said this to him, and he said, yeah, but no one had any money. And this, somehow that planted the seed of an idea in my skull that said, you have to have money at the bottom. Which means therefore, you have to have money at the top.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  You can't hold on to shit to the bottom and then get money. And so you, you, you really have to resist the irresistible urge to be invested when being invested has been so profitable. Now ironically, he made a probably a hundred fold off General Electric. And I tried to talk him into selling it.

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Because, because I had paid attention to Jack Welch and his, and his, and his bean counting and stuff. And I, I knew that G, GM Capital, uh, uh, GE Capital was a problem and stuff like that. But how do you convince a guy who's made a hundred fold on a stock that he should sell it? And why the hell should he listen to you?

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  And, and, um, Morgan Howells, one of his most strong arguments in his book, that again, I just finished, is that you really, really, really want to resist the urge, resist the urge to, to stop the compounding. So one of the reasons why you have to invest by your own personal metric

• 2:06:58Speaker 03

  is so that you don't bail.

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  And so I try to buy an asset now, in which I use Michael Berry's thesis, that if, if worse comes to worse, you hang on to it. And that's not Netflix, and that's not Arc, that's none of those.

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  That is kind of gold, because you say fuck it, right? Um, it's been around 5,000 years, I'll hang on to it. It, it, it is, it is, I don't know, quite a bit of Rio Tinto.

• 2:07:31Speaker 03

  It would take an asteroid to take out their mining operations. They have a big dividend, they have a low P E. And, and they have cash on the balance sheet. And

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  I just feel good about that. I, I don't, I'm, I'm avoiding every company with debt. I can handle a little as long as the debt's small relative to the revenues.

• 2:07:57Speaker 03

  And I say, okay.

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  You know, one exception is tobacco.

• 2:08:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave, I literally could talk to you, I think, for like two days straight, no sleep. And we could talk about all the dark, crazy shit going on in the world.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  So what do you disagree with you? I babble my ass up, but where would you say, oh shit? You know, that, that part's the part I just can't sign off on. What, what, what, what part did you have to bite your lip going, oh, fuck? We just lost our, we not only lost our audience, which you already have acknowledged, but, but you lost me too. Was there any part that?

• 2:08:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think the, uh, there, there's two pieces. One, I don't, actually, I don't know the answer to either one of them. But the one thing I would challenge is this idea that we're going to go into like a super deep, uh, kind of painful recession. And I agree with the analysis, actually, right? That, that like, that is where we would be headed.

• 2:08:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I probably have more confidence that the Fed, uh, is going to wave the white flag pivot and just start dropping monetary stimulus all over the place again. You know, well before we get to, I don't know.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  Can they do that though? Here's the problem. This is why inflation strikes so important. Can they do it with inflation screaming at them?

• 2:09:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I don't think that they have, uh, the, the classic trade off between inflation or recession. Right? Uh, was all Fed policy driven, they can do whatever. Now we have this stagflationary period. And I think they're going to have to choose. You're going to have to bite the bullet on one. Which one are you going to bite the bullet on? And my guess is that if you say, we are going to prevent a true on full, you know, catastrophic recession and people will have to live with high inflation. That is the lesser of the two evils. Because you and I will yell and scream from the hill. What are you guys doing? This is insane. Inflation sucks, all this stuff.

• 2:09:57Anthony Pompliano?

  But the average person, yeah, things got expensive. They have no clue what's going on.

• 2:10:02Speaker 03

  I'm not sure that's true. I think they're gonna blame somebody.

• 2:10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, they for 100%. But the people who are responsible aren't elected officials. And so from that standpoint, uh, you know, if you really look at it like Powell getting reaffirmed, uh, reappointed, whatever you want to call it, uh, by Biden, I think was actually a pretty important data point on, okay, we're now going to go across party lines here. We are going to, uh, kind of hang our hat on this approach, less the person and more the approach. Uh, and I'm always careful to say like, I don't think that Jerome Powell, if he was to be replaced by somebody else, would necessarily look good or bad. I just think that somebody would do exactly

• 2:10:48Anthony Pompliano?

  what he's doing. Like he's doing what their data tells them to do and what their models and kind of their framework is. We just live in a really, really complex time where, you know, as you know, we've talked about before, I don't think a human-led monetary policy is ultimately up for the task of navigating a world of unknowns, right? Like I just, I just find that a losing battle. And so, uh, I choose to, uh, shield myself from it, you know, in a major way, right? And that's where obviously the Bitcoin stuff comes in. Now, the downside to it on a day-to-day basis in the short term, if you're not looking at it from an investment standpoint, you're not

• 2:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  looking at it from shielding, you know, your, your investment portfolio, all this, and you're saying, hey, uh, I live paycheck to paycheck, right? Going back to not having the $400. Can you put your economic wealth into an asset that goes up a lot and down a lot? And sometimes, you know, both of those in the same week? Well, you know, a little bit harder to wrap your head around that. And so I think, um, different people have different objectives, right? And so I just find it hard that the Federal Reserve will allow us to go into some, you know, 08-style, uh, recession. But if they do, I then question, um,

• 2:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  so much does inflation come down as much as just the base effect takes place?

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  Well, the base effect, eventually, well, I'm not sure the base effect.

• 2:12:26Speaker 03

  In countries where inflation gets out of control, they don't get saved by the base effect.

• 2:12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but what I'm saying is like, if you look at, so the 0% inflation from June to July, right, they're celebrating saying, you know.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  No, that's not true, though. That's just a lie.

• 2:12:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 2:12:41Speaker 03

  There was, there was eight and a half percent inflation.

• 2:12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. And so that eight and a half percent, though, remember, I think it was June of 2021 was the first month we had over 5% inflation, and it never came back down. We have now gone more than 12 months with over 5% inflation in the United States of America. And so if we have eight and a half percent in July of 2022, that is now compounding. We are, we're now in the compounding game.

• 2:13:05Speaker 03

  Exactly right. And so, um, and so, one thing we know is that if inflation stays up, we are not going to be talking five years from now about, I don't see how this has stayed up without causing a problem.

• 2:13:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  Because, because if you're losing 10% of your spending power a year, and that goes on more than one year, again, half the country is going to be starving pretty soon. So this, this is a, um, this is a countdown clock right here. This is a countdown clock at lost. This is, um, this, so, so this is not sustainable. There's the other, that's the little one. She's a perpetual puppy.

• 2:13:55Anthony Pompliano?

  The other thing that I would say to you is, again, I agree with your analysis on the non-financial events. A lot of the data points don't add up. A lot of the data points just leave you scratching your head saying, what, what is going on? Right?

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, I think it was actually you, who maybe two years ago, I think you were doing a podcast with Marty Bent, and in it, you were going over your year in review, and you said something that always stuck with, I'm pretty sure it was you, who said, you know, the problem with the climate change debate is that most of the analysis that is done, the thesis gets negated when the experiments are done.

• 2:14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And so naturally, some portion of the scientific community basically just throws their hands up and says, well, we tested all our other ideas, so it must be humans.

• 2:14:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Rather than go and prove, here is exactly what humans are doing, but whatever, right? And I kind of feel a little bit like, uh, when you get into the really dark stuff, not, not you, uh, personally, but like, just the deeper you go down these rabbit holes, uh, and we all do it. It's kind of like, um, uh, it's kind of like the modern version of, uh, the thing that you do that you don't want anyone to know you do, except for just some weirdos like you and I that, that we end up talking about it, right? But like, people get on the internet and they start Googling around and they end up in some weird place. And then they're kind of like, oh shit, like, how did I get here? You know,

• 2:15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  whatever. But things don't make sense. And so we've now seen enough examples where we've losing trust in institutions, or we feel like we're being misled or whatever. We just immediately assume it's nefarious. And I do wonder, um, if, if you try to fight that, which is very hard. I mean, I, I fall victim to it all the time. How much of it is just like, the world is weird. We don't understand a lot of shit. And so like, you can take a bunch of data points and like, the natural conclusion may not be the actual answer versus like, no, this shit's real dark and like, there's really fucking nefarious things that happen. And like, you know, we just happen to have uncovered the, the data

• 2:16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  points or the ingredients. And so we just haven't yet found the smoking gun that, you know, ends up with the conclusion. And each situation is different, right? I don't know.

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  I think it's, I think it's easier to detect the bullshit than to undo it and to unravel it. And so I, I, you know, when you start catching people lying to you. So the climate change, that's one of the first tip offs is that you start running into big lies. And, and, and, and they actually philosophically believe that their cause is so just that, that lying is legit. It's sort of like if Trump's Hitler, then of course you do anything to make sure that he doesn't get reelected. And if you really think he's Hitler, of course the dog's doing it again. If you really think he's Hitler, then who, who wouldn't do anything to prevent him from getting reelected? Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:05Speaker 03

  And the mob psychology where you, you all agree, right? You and your echo chamber agree that he's Hitler. And so you, you get reinforced. And I think to go down unconventional paths, you need some reinforcement, but there's an optimum in that curve. So you need reinforcement so that, so you don't feel so insane, you just can't do it. So when I was buying gold in 1999, there was not much reinforcement, but there was a couple of key players who were going, you know, this is looking like a pretty good time to be buying gold. And, and, uh, and without that, I couldn't have done it. And, and when I was buying tobacco

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  stocks and, oh God, I think it was like 2003 or I can't even remember, it was so long ago. When they were facing a big lawsuit and stuff and, and it, it took me a while to piece together the story to say, um, this lawsuit can't hurt him. As soon as I realized the lawsuit couldn't hurt him, I go, oh, these are a buy now. And, um, and so I can, I think, I, I think I'm okay at generating enough concern, uh, digging out enough data to say, okay, the story we're being told is wrong. But without digging out enough data

• 2:18:28Speaker 03

  to be able to say, and this is the true story, because that's a totally different bar. That's a totally different standard. And, and, and if they're really good at being nefarious, you could be 20 layers of the onion wrong. And, you know, all you have to do is like, things like, you know, you don't remember, but, you know, when we found out that Reagan was trading arms for hostages and stuff like that, and you go, "What? Really?" And all of a sudden, you find out, "Wait a minute, we're now allied with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, right? Weren't they the bad guys at one point?" So, this very surreal world. And, and, and then you, you, you watch someone like, like

• 2:19:07Speaker 03

  Khashoggi get killed in the Saudi Embassy, right? He's one fucking guy. Who cares? I mean, who the hell cares? He's one guy in the Saudi Embassy. You go to Saudi Arabia, you get killed. Excuse me, that's a Darwin Award, as far as I'm concerned. And, and it's a shame for the family, but meanwhile, the press completely ignores tens of thousands being killed in Yemen by the Saudis. One dead Khashoggi versus tens of thousands of Yemenis. There's no way to explain those two, in the, contextually, the juxtaposition of those

• 2:19:46Speaker 03

  two facts just doesn't make sense, without invoking geopolitical, nefarious, propaganda-rich everything. I, I went back and read Edwin Bernay's classic 1926 book on propaganda, just to, to look at what the, the godfather of the field said about propaganda. We're slathered with propaganda. It's, it's part of our culture. So, everything, you know, when they try to sell you a car, it's propaganda. But where it gets dubious is, is when the government is using propaganda to get you to sign off on just total dogshit. And, and

• 2:20:28Speaker 03

  now that the government is 50% of our GDP, it's, you know, back at the turn of the century, the other century, the government was like 3% of GDP. It didn't matter, right? The world just, it kind of ran itself, and the government was just, you know, you could get some senator to pass some law that made your business work better. But, but now the trillions and trillions of dollars are being handed out. So, Halliburton went from being a, a company that used to be involved in getting energy out of the ground to a company whose sole purpose is to get government contracts. That's their entire business model, is to get government contracts.

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  And, and, and government's now so big. And the corruption therefore is so deep. And I think back to climate change, people say, well, you know, big oil's paying you. There's, I have tried to find the thread of big oil to climate deniers. I can't find it. And there's a lot of people trying to say it's there. I can't find it. What I can tell you is, is the, the, the climate industrial complex, on the other hand, they're projecting a hundred and fifty trillion dollars to be spent on it. That's, that, that's serious money. That starts adding up after a while.

• 2:21:52Speaker 03

  And so, again, for me, the climate change story changed when I found out that they were lying their ass off constantly. And, and, and we can talk about that if you want. I mean, the first lie is that there's no credible scientists who don't believe it. Right? That's the standard statement. The only guys who don't believe it are not credible. Nobel Prize winning physicists all over the globe have denounced it, but no one cares. The, the former head of the National Academy of Science said it's the biggest hoax in history. Is he not credible? The guy who used to run NASA's temperature monitoring program says there's no, there's no warming.

• 2:22:32Speaker 03

  The, the 500 PhD scientists at NASA wrote a letter saying, please cut back on your rhetoric. There, there, there's gazillions of people screaming at the top of their lungs that this story's wrong. You know Doenberg, right?

• 2:22:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I do.

• 2:22:49Speaker 03

  Doenberg is a smart bastard and I know his background and, and he was highly placed. And he said, when he gets into this debate, he just points out that, um, that, that the equations are all nonlinear. And anyone who does modeling knows that nonlinear, a pile of nonlinear equations can't be solved.

• 2:23:11Speaker 03

  And so

• 2:23:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Smart.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  So I, no, I, I think, I think most of what we're being told is a big lie.

• 2:23:20Speaker 03

  But does it matter? Most of the time, no.

• 2:23:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:24Speaker 03

  I've, I've turned on pharma like you wouldn't believe. Covid destroyed pharma's rep.

• 2:23:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:30Speaker 03

  I, I, if, if, if you're taking, if you're taking a drug to lower your blood pressure, you should talk to your doctor. You got duped. If you're taking Nexim, you got duped.

• 2:23:43Speaker 03

  If you, there, there's just so many, there's so many drugs out there that, that, that not only serve no purpose, but that they, my wife just took a drug.

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  For, uh, she has a vomiting disorder. And, uh, and Dilant was working and stopped working. So, so I, we went to doctors recently and they put her on a new one called Lamotrigine or something. One in 10 people get a rash that sends them to the ER. One in 10.

• 2:24:17Speaker 03

  Is that, and can be fatal. The FDA cleared that? That's a miracle drug to take that kind of risk.

• 2:24:27Speaker 03

  And I think the FDA is now clearing drugs

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  with no justification whatsoever. I think the FDA has been completely commandeered by Big Pharma. Completely. 100%.

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  And, and, and I could be convinced that there are good drugs coming out still. I, I was involved in Chantix in a very sort of peripheral way and, but, but I think so many of the drugs we're taking. You know the drug from Biogen that got cleared for Alzheimer's?

• 2:25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 2:25:02Speaker 03

  Last year, in the middle of the vaccine push, Biogen got a drug cleared for Alzheimer's. $56,000 a year. It turns out that the FDA panel, I think 13 said no, and the 14th said, I'm not sure. And the FDA cleared it.

• 2:25:27Speaker 03

  I just found out from a book I just finished on the FDA that they actually had terminated the clinical trials. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, they cleared the drug anyways. So I think the pharmaceutical industry has gone from trying to develop legitimate drugs to developing a business model where they can push drugs through regardless of their efficacy. And, and, and, and they can win in court.

• 2:26:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 2:26:02Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's a tax. And so I don't think I'll ever take a drug which I can't identify the positive effect. So if I have an infection, I get it. If I have a rash and a steroid makes it goes away, I get it. But if you say some level of something of mine is too high or too low, I'm not taking it. The statins are a nightmare. The whole statin story, the people taking blood pressure modi- modifying medicines, there are people who need it because they're super high risk, but they're, they're, they're, they're giving it to everybody.

• 2:26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26:34Speaker 03

  They're saying, oh, your blood pressure's 160 over, you know, 100, you should, I wish you put you on a statin. They did a clinical trial looking for evidence that that was needed, and the clinical trial failed. Didn't stop them. Uh, my, my wife was on a drug called Neuron that said, it was passed for shingles pain. Pfizer said, okay, let's see if we can get this cleared for neuropathic pain. And it turns out that, uh, it turns out that, that they did a clinical trial and they got nothing, nothing, zero. And, and, and then they called in a bunch of experts and said, look at the data again, make lemonade out of lemons, find a way.

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  And, and the internal documents from a court case said, nothing. This, this group said, it's over, game over, not gonna happen. They approached the FDA informally and the FDA said, don't bother.

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  And what did they do? They got a couple of academics to write a bunch of fraudulent papers on the potential of Neurontin for neuropathic pain in general. Pfizer then bought a million copies and they handed them out to doctors all over the world. Ninety-eight percent of Neurontin's market is off-label generalized neuropathic pain.

• 2:27:58Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  It's crazy. So I believe, here's what I think has happened to pharma. They have picked all the low-lying fruit, period. They've got the antibiotics, they've got some antivirals, and now they're, they're, they're trying to go for lifestyle. They're trying to go for things that just change who you are, sort of. And, um, and I think, therefore, what it means is it's an industry that should be shrinking because there are no longer low-lying fruit. And, and, and instead of naturally shrinking like people who made wagons for

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  a living in nineteen hundred, they have chosen to use graft and corruption to keep their business model going.

• 2:28:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave, I want to stop right there. We're just going, as a ending sentence, I think there's more of it in the world than you and I want to, uh, to see or, uh, or admit to others. Um, there's a lot of people who may not have heard our previous conversations. Where can we send them to find you on the internet, uh, or find the Year in Review, uh, or any of the other things that you write?

• 2:29:23Speaker 03

  Well, if you search my name, David Column, and Year in Review, and then you put in a date, it's gotten harder because Peak Prosperity changed their website, but you'll find Year in Reviews for each year back about a dozen years. Um, if you go to Twitter, it's David B. Column is the handle. I figure I'm not long for this world on Twitter. I think there, I think I'm close to getting booted. I just found out yesterday, I'm betting, I guess, there's a bot that checks and seeing if you're being silenced. And I scored worse than Alex Berensen and James Woods.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  So, and there's very few people who are scoring poorly and I, I, they're, I've noticed funny things. So I think I'm going to be on Twitter for a limited period, uh, but a David B. Column. The year in review from last year is my pinned tweet and, and it's, uh, be careful. It's not for the faint of heart. It's 300 pages.

• 2:30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  We will definitely do this again. Maybe we'll do it again when, uh, when you write this year's,

• 2:30:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wore you down, I think.

• 2:30:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Hopefully, no, hopefully you're gonna write this year's gonna be 400 pages.

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  No, it's not actually. I, I, I, I have to invent, I have to reinvent it somehow. I, I've been thinking of various angles to come at it.

• 2:30:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Write a 10 pager, just like super short, 10 pages.

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  The problem is you can't get into anything. Then it just becomes a shallow list of bullets. You, you can't digest a topic that efficiently.

• 2:30:51Anthony Pompliano?

  That is very true.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna have to leave shit on the cutting room floor.

• 2:30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, my friend. I appreciate it as always. Uh, every time I talk to you, you make me think much more deeply about various, uh, aspects of the world, but also financial markets and, uh, we will definitely do this again. So I appreciate your time today.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  Adios, muchacho. It was fun.

• 2:31:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.